The 2014-15 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series presents an evening with award-winning fiction writer Karen Russell. According to National Public Radio, Russell "is arguably our greatest fantasist writing serious fiction today," and her latest book, the e-novella The Sleep Donation, is "a quick, topsy-turvy thriller, that extends her oeuvre into Orwellian territory." She is most well-known for her novel Swamplandia, which was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize (the year the Pulitzer was not awarded in the fiction category) and selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2011.

Time Out Chicago describes her book Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Other Stories as "dazzlingly strange .... vacillating between horror and humor, Russell's writing recalls both George Saunders and vintage Stephen King, sometimes simultaneously."

Russell was the youngest of the 2013 MacArthur Foundation genius fellowship recipients, and she has been included in The New Yorker's 20 Under 40, the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35, and among Granta's Best Young American Novelists. People magazine writes, "Karen Russell is a storyteller with a voice like no other."