Meet Carol Carlson

Carol Carlson has lived a life seeking adventures and contending with challenges. Some of both have been significant; some covered in her current books, others, we imagine, destined to be shared in future works. Carol spent her younger years, what she calls her “hippie” days, moving around the country after leaving home at just seventeen.

She lived in sixteen cities in nine different states, while working jobs ranging from a cattle ranch in South Dakota and a Lamaze Childbirth Instructor in Kentucky to professional fundraiser and executive director for major nonprofit organizations in Colorado and Tennessee. Many of those years also included volunteer work as a Naturalist at State and National Parks. She is most at peace in the Colorado mountains and happiest hiking and ziplining through the forest, even still, as she moves well into her 70’s. City life found Carol working with terminally ill children, running the local Humane Society and going up against city hall to protect promised benefits for city employees. Carol is now both mom and mother-in-law to two police officers. In 2015, she founded an organization for mothers of police officers, guiding and supporting them through the worries of having a son or daughter that wear the badge.

It was this role that led her to acknowledge her lifelong love of writing and her first published book. Carol now resides near her family in Memphis, TN. Through all the roles she has held in life, none is more important to her than that of Mom. It should come as no surprise that it is that role that has presented her greatest joys and deepest heartaches. A daughter born to her at just eighteen. A son, eight years later, the impetus for Life as a Police Mom. And a second son that died of leukemia eight years after that and became the focus of her children’s book, David Died Last Night. Although the years and adventures have left her with some minor mobility issues, she still chooses adventure and insists she had a lot of fun wearing her body out along the way. It’s that indominable spirit that allows Carol to turn some of her greatest challenges into the books we love to read and from which we can learn to navigate our own difficult days.