Educator | Journalist | Historical & Genealogical Researcher

Karen Stewart has long been motivated by the untold story.

An educator, journalist, and historical and genealogical researcher, Stewart has spent more than two decades in education while maintaining a parallel commitment to journalism, research, and storytelling. A graduate of Howard University in broadcast journalism and Virginia Commonwealth University in education, she has worked as a classroom educator, freelance journalist, feature writer, and editorial and interview producer.

Her journalism experience includes freelance reporting for The Washington Afro-American Newspaper and The Prince George’s Post, as well as writing and blogging for Living Wisely Magazine and editorial and production work through My Media Buzz. Her reporting and interviews have explored the lives of people confronting issues ranging from politics and culture to natural disasters, international conflict, forgiveness, and personal transformation.

Her interviews have included former Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder; the late author Bebe Moore Campbell, in connection with her novel 72 Hour Hold; author, television writer and producer Susan Fales-Hill; motivational speaker and author Lisa Nichols; author and screenwriter Liz Tuccillo; and Mary Johnson-Roy, the Minneapolis mother who became nationally known for forgiving the man who murdered her only son. Stewart also interviewed Hurricane Katrina survivors and evacuees in the Washington, D.C., area and missionaries whose lives and work were affected by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria.

Her editorial and interview-production work has included identifying and researching issues and guests, developing program topics and interview questions, preparing background materials for on-air talent, booking guests, contributing to long-range editorial planning, and assisting with event production.

That same instinct for uncovering the story beneath the surface eventually drew Stewart more deeply into genealogy, African American history, public history, and historic preservation. Her research explores family and community histories, post-emancipation landownership and settlement, historic African American communities, cemeteries, and the ways descendants can help recover and preserve histories that might otherwise disappear. She is a member of numerous genealogical, historical, and public-history organizations and has presented her research in public and professional settings.

A member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) and a descendant of both enslaved people and Free People of Color, Stewart’s family history is deeply rooted in historic African American and Indigenous communities across the South. Her ancestral ties extend from New Bern and the Burnt Swamp–Union Chapel Indigenous and African American community (pre-1885) of Robeson County, North Carolina, to Central and southeast Texas, including Littig, and Houston’s Freedmen’s Town, as well as the post-emancipation community established by her family in Rome, Georgia, that would became known as Berry College (adjacent to the current Possum Trot landscape). These ancestral connections inform her commitment to researching, documenting, interpreting, and preserving the histories of families and communities whose stories have too often been overlooked or incompletely told.

Stewart is founder and president of the Shelton Heritage Society of Georgia & Historic Possum Trot, a descendant researcher with the Shelton Family Settlement at Possum Trot, a board member of the Georgia Black History Trail, the Descendants Forum and a research collaborator with the Society of the First African Families of English America’s Forgotten Patriots project.

She is a contributing author to Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press/Coming to the Table, 2019). Among her continuing research and writing interests is the life and legacy of her great-uncle, Texas blues pianist Edwin “Buster” Goodwin Pickens, considered the last of the great sawmill pianists. A soloist in his own right, Pickens also played piano in Lightnin’ Hopkins’ band prior to his untimely passing in 1964. His story is part of Stewart’s broader interest in recovering the lives and contributions of people whose significance has not always been adequately preserved in the historical record.

A veteran educator and former grade-level chair, Stewart has taught students across grade levels, including students admitted to leading college-preparatory schools such as St. John's College High School, Georgetown Visitation, Georgetown Prep, DeMatha, Bishop McNamara and Elizabeth Seton.

Whether in a classroom, archive, historic landscape, interview, or through the written word, Stewart remains guided by the questions: Whose story has gone untold? What can the evidence reveal? How can that story be shared in a way that matters? And how can knowledge transform lives?