To this day, Carolyn Grace ’15 can’t list all the places she has lived, but Idaho’s wheat fields blur into “an ocean of gold” in her memory. It was there she read “Anne of Green Gables” and admired Lucy Maud Montgomery’s romanticizing of nature. Without the roots to form real-life friendships, Carolyn and Lucy, and other writers like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Emily Dickinson, formed “a community of stories.”
Even these dreamt friendships had been delayed.
“I struggled to learn to read at first,” Grace explained. “I was in the bottom of my class in the second grade. But I think it was because the books we were reading were so boring.”
Getting her hands on Gertrude Chandler Warner’s “The Boxcar Children” changed everything. With something interesting to read, Grace soon was outpacing her classmates.
The first place that felt like home was Virginia, where the family settled at last in a “small-town gem” along the Blue Ridge Parkway known for hippie communes and artisan affairs. This new community of stories included Friday night jamborees that sparked Grace’s interest in music.
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Until her junior year in college, Grace explored her musical side more than her literary one. She joined the choir, performed in operas and learned to play piano and guitar. When it came time to consider higher education, adults pushed her toward conservatory training, even if, to her, that particular note seemed pitchy. Grace was not confident in the choice, but also, the specter of heavy debt was a deterrent.
“I wasn’t going to go deeply into debt,” she said, “especially for a life I wasn’t completely sure about.”
One day, her mother read a story in the newspaper about a local student who was attending Berea College. Grace had only considered local options, and though a high school friend confirmed the school’s legitimacy, she didn’t have the means to actually travel there to find out for herself. So, Berea came to her.
“Berea sent an admissions counselor six hours to pick me and my mom up, drive us to campus and drive us home,” Grace related. “That was extraordinary. I realized Berea was the right place for me, and it set me up in a way that I don’t think I would have been set up in other places.”
She declared an intended music major, but by the second semester, Grace was already being drawn elsewhere. Libby Jones’s creative writing class unlocked something within her.
“Writing felt like breathing,” Grace said. “It felt like remembering.”
She stayed in the music department for years, but poetry tugged insistently. Eventually, she switched her major to English and minored in music.
“Creative writing kept me sane,” Grace continued, remembering how she memorized Dickinson poems as a kid. “It reminded me who I am.”
Berea allowed her to explore herself and other places that reawakened an itinerant past. Grace studied Irish poetry on the Emerald Isle, composing lyrical sequences inspired by liminal landscapes and blending research into verse.
For Grace, her education was not about future vocation—it was about understanding herself in the here and now.
I didn’t go to college with the idea of what job I wanted. I went to do the things I cared about.
Carolyn Grace ’15
“I didn’t go to college with the idea of what job I wanted,” she said. “I went to do the things I cared about.”
Still, an English degree, she reasoned, would be useful for the next step. “Everybody needs a person who knows how to write,” Grace said. “Everybody needs a person who knows how to edit.”
These skills led Grace to her first job out of college, working as a regulatory specialist in clinical research and assuring compliance with federal guidelines. And life had her moving again, to Cincinnati, Kentucky and, eventually, back to Virginia, where she tutors neurodivergent students.
Within these lines of travel and time were publication and graduate school. Grace returned to Berea to read at a poetry conference, not knowing a publisher sat in the audience. She was offered a book deal on the spot. Grace finished her book at Eastern Kentucky University’s Master of Fine Art program.
And now, Grace’s debut collection of poetry, Grenadine and Other Love Affairs, a lyrical glossary of terms that explores selfhood, origin and meaning, has rooted her in the larger literary world. Not too far in the future, perhaps, she will also join some other little girl’s community of stories.
