Carolyn Holbrook is a writer, educator, and longtime advocate for the healing power of the arts. She is the author of an essay collection, Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify (University of MN Press, 2020), a chapbook, Earth Angels (Spout Press 2020), and is co-author with Arleta Little of MN civil rights icon, Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s memoir, Hope In the Struggle (University of MN Press 2019). Her personal essays have been published widely, most recently in A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (MN Historical Society Press 2016) and Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (MN Historical Society Press 2015). She is the recipient of three Minnesota State Arts Board grants (2015, 2018, 2020) and a MRAC Next Step grant (20Carolyn Holbrook is a writer, educator, and longtime advocate for the healing power of the arts. She is the author of an essay collection, Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify (University of MN Press, 2020), a chapbook, Earth Angels (Spout Press 2020), and is co-author with Arleta Little of MN civil rights icon, Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s memoir, Hope In the Struggle (University of MN Press 2019). Her personal essays have been published widely, most recently in A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (MN Historical Society Press 2016) and Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (MN Historical Society Press 2015). She is the recipient of three Minnesota State Arts Board grants (2015, 2018, 2020) and a MRAC Next Step grant (2019). In 2016, she was awarded a 50 over 50 award from AARP/Pollen Midwest.
Holbrook was the first person of color to win the Minnesota Book Awards Kay Sexton Award (2010). She is founder and artistic/executive director of More Than a Single Story for which she won a MN Women’s Press Changemaker award in 2015, and was founder and director of SASE: The Write Place (1993-2006). She teaches creative writing at the Loft Literary Center and other community venues, and at Hamline University, where she won the Exemplary Teacher award in 2014....more