Shepherd, Karen, 1940-

Karen Shepherd (born July 5, 1940) is an American educator and politician. A member of the Democratic Party, she served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Utah between 1993 to 1995.

Born Karen Felker in Silver City, New Mexico, her family soon moved to southern Utah and lived in many small towns throughout Shepherd's childhood before settling in Provo where she went to high school. Felker earned a B.A. in English from the University of Utah in 1962 and an M.A. in British Literature from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1963. In 1963, she married Vincent Shepherd and they moved to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he was an officer in the Army. In Washington, she taught English at Olympic Junior College. Upon her husband's discharge from the Army, the couple both accepted positions at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where they lived for two years. After returning stateside, they settled in Utah where Karen Shepherd taught Freshman English at Brigham Young University, became active with the Democratic Party, and worked in publishing. In 1990, Shepherd was elected to the Utah State Senate.

With a platform supporting abortion rights, a balanced budget amendment, and an expanded role of government in health care, Shepherd ran to succeed Congressman Wayne Owens after Owens elected to challenge businessman Bob Bennett for Utah's open U.S. Senate seat in 1992. In a presidential election year when Bill Clinton received only 25 percent of the votes in Utah, Shepherd still managed to win her race by a narrow 50 percent to 47 percent margin, defeating Republican Enid Greene to become the second woman in Utah's history to be elected to Congress. Shepherd supported President Clinton's 1993 Budget package that cut the budget and also raised taxes on upper income people. She also supported gun control measures. These stances made Shepherd vulnerable and in her 1994 rematch with Greene, who since had married and changed her surname to Waldholtz, Shepherd lost by a significant margin.

After Congress, Shepherd was a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1996 she was named executive director of the European Bank for Reconstruction Development, which steered loans to newly emergent democratic governments in Eastern Europe. Two years later, she chaired the East West Trade and Investment Forum of the American Chamber of Commerce. In 2000 Shepherd helped to found the Utah Women’s Political Caucus, and she served as a member of the international delegation to monitor elections in the West Bank and Gaza.