Bio

-What's your name?
Karalynn Emma Brown. Or Kara.

- Where are you from?
Gretna, NE.

- What year are you in school?
A junior year-wise. Probably more credit-wise.

- What is your career goal?
I’m not one for decisiveness, but here it goes: in two years, I plan to be in the Peace Corps teaching English or doing NGO/community development in either Jordan, Eastern Europe, or somewhere in South America, depending on how my study abroad and language learning pan out. In five years, I plan to be in law school for international human rights, in graduate school for English/sociology, or working as a journalist, hopefully in order to do foreign corresponding, all depending on how the Peace Corps pan out.
I have a lot of interests.

- What do you like to read?
This could also fit under my “passionate” subcategory.
At present I’m really into stream-of-consciousness, like Virginia Woolf, and post-colonial literature, like Salman Rushdie. Also, Audre Lorde’s 1989 commencement address at Oberlin College is fantastic. Reading is probably the single greatest activity that exists. Period.
And now I have proven myself a literature geek.

- Where do you get your news?
The Journal-Star, the Times (especially on Tuesday), the DN, my economist/computer scientist brother.

- Do you have any journalism experience?
I suppose one could say that. I am currently an “Editor Intern” (indentured servant) for an online publication called Watching America, which translates foreign press articles about the U.S. into English for the small and peculiar percentage of the American population that actually care what everyone else thinks.
And then there's the obligatory high school newspapering and Alumni Magazining.
But I think journalism can be a broad term that involves all forms of disseminating information, in which case we all do it to varying degrees in our daily lives.

- Do you have a blog?
Nope. But perhaps I should; I do like to read them.

- What are passionate about?
I believe in international cooperation and full engagement in the world community. I teach English as a learned language to immigrant women and read and think about cultures and disenfranchised groups.
I believe that language and consequently education are the cornerstones of social change and one of the most subtle yet accurate indicators of power structures, both on the micro and macro levels.
I’m interested in how these groups, especially women in the Muslim world and the Eastern European bloc, are feeling the backlash of globalization on all levels. And I’m passionate about getting groups in power, like comfortable Midwestern university students, to care.
I’m incredibly passionate about art—in the visual, musical, written, spoken (Spanish and English now, hopefully Arabic or Russian soon), eaten and worn forms. I, like Vonnegut, believe it makes life worth living.
And finally, today I’m pretty passionate about my mom’s poetry, dorking around in a house on 16^th Street, and a song called “The Wild Kindness.”

- Is there anything else you'd like us to know about you?
I can be socially awkward from time to time, or so I hear. But it’s just as well; I think most of what we do anyway is the result of social constructs.
So basically, I´m rebelling.
Yeah, take that society. I will be as awkward as I want.