Karla Starr was born in Buffalo, NY and attended New York University, where she was the editor-in-chief of the school’s oldest literary magazine as a sophomore. After college, she taught middle school math and English in New Orleans with Teach For America.
After moving to Portland, Oregon, she landed a job at the alt-weekly as the editor of the books section, where she interviewed legends like Gore Vidal, Gay Talese, and Susan Orlean. At her next job at Seattle Weekly, she wrote the publication’s most popular story in history, an exposé of video game testing, before moving to Argentina.
After living in Buenos Aires for a few years, she returned to the U.S. at the height of the Great Recession. Seeing the randomness of which of her friends were flailing and which were flourishing inspired to write her first book. Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others. CYLTBL was named a Fast Company best book of the year.
She coauthored her second book, Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, with Chip Heath, Stanford business professor and four-time NYT bestselling co-author (Switch, Made to Stick). MNC was featured in publications and outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Adam Grant, NPR, and the Next Big Idea Club.
Today, the bestselling author and keynote speaker works as an independent transdisciplinary researcher. She leads workshops on behavior, data, and communication. She writes the popular Substack newsletter The Starr Report and is a columnist for Medium.
Starr has been featured in publications and outlets including NPR, CBS Sunday Morning, The Atlantic, Slate, Popular Science, the Guardian, and is the recipient of an award for the Best Science/Health story from the Society of Professional Journalists.
When not working, she enjoys cooking, reading actual books (here’s a list of her favorites), and taking long walks with her dog Daisy.
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