MFA in Writing Colloquium: In conversation: Carolyn Ferrell & Cary Johnson

Carolyn Ferrell '84 is the author of the novel, Dear Miss Metropolitan, and the short-story collection, Don’t Erase Me, which was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize program, the John C. Zacharis Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. She has also received grants from the Fulbright Association, German Academic Exchange (DAAD), City University of New York MAGNET Program, and National Endowment for the Arts. Ferrell’s stories have been anthologized in the 1994, 2018, and 2020 volumes of Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the Century, among other places . She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children. 

Cary Johnson is an author, activist and Africanist raised in Brooklyn and currently living in Central Africa. He studied writing with Wesley Brown, Jane Copper Alexis DeVeaux, Randall Kenan, Louise Meriwether, and Susan Scarf-Merrell and has a Bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. A long-time innovator in national and international queer politics and cultural activism, he was a founder of several groundbreaking organizations, including the Blackheart Collective, Gay Men of African Descent, Other Countries, and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. A public health and HIV specialist with experience living and working in Guinea, Haiti, Mali, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe, Cary is currently the country director for Population Services International in Burundi.