About Kari Carlisle
I’m an editor, writer, and longtime nonprofit leader. Editing and writing have been consistent threads throughout my career, alongside more than twenty years of leading museums and cultural organizations. Whether I was working with a manuscript, an exhibit, or nonprofit communications, I helped people determine what they needed to say, why it mattered, and how to make people care.
That experience taught me to look beneath the information for the idea or story holding it together. It also taught me to recognize when an audience may lose the thread and how to make complicated subjects understandable without stripping away their complexity.
My experience includes books, essays, articles, museum exhibits, interpretive materials, newsletters, marketing content, grant proposals, and other mission-driven writing. I have worked with fiction, creative nonfiction, research-based manuscripts, and work translated into English.
I studied theology and anthropology, two fields that taught me to pay close attention to interpretation, culture, meaning, and human experience. Those interests continue to shape both my editing and my own writing.
I’m also an active writer of speculative fiction and creative nonfiction. Because I bring my own work through drafting, revision, critique, rejection, and submission, I understand how much a writer can have invested in every page.
That experience makes me a better editor. I know that useful feedback must do more than identify a problem. It should help the writer see the possibilities still present in the work.
Beyond the Page
Houndgroup Productions would not be complete without my greyhounds, Pete and Myka. Myka is now the face of the business, quite literally, while both dogs provide supervision of questionable value.
When I’m not editing or writing, I lead a local speculative fiction book club, explore Arizona’s trails and dark skies, and spend time with my husband and the hounds.
If you have a project that matters to you and want an editor who will take both the work and your intentions seriously, I would be glad to hear about it.
My story “What He Made” placed 3rd in the April 2026 Jerboa Lit flash fiction contest. Judge feedback:
“We loved the creepy atmosphere Kari conjured up. Great work!”