Karin Evans is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, San Francisco Examiner, Boston Globe, and other publications. She was a founding editor of Rocky Mountain Magazine, was an editor at Outside magazine, and was a senior editor for the San Francisco Examiner Sunday magazine and for Health magazine. Evans spent two years working at the Newsweek Hong Kong bureau, where she became familiar with Chinese culture. She has commented that she felt drawn to that part of the world and felt at home there.

Evans lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, attorney Mark Humbert, and their adopted daughter, Kelly Xiao Yu. The couple adopted Kelly in 1997 from Jiangmen, Guangdong, China. Evans's book The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past (2000) tells of her experience adopting a Chinese...