Carolyne grew up in the South Shore outside Boston. heavily involved in the Boston zine culture from a young age, she attended a local writing workshop and performed weekly at the famous Club Passim's open mic under the pen name Ginger Vytis, receiving helpful feedback and honing her skills as a poet and performer. She studied Creative Writing (poetry and fiction) at College of Santa Fe, during which time she also participated in and then volunteered for the local youth slam poetry team, making it to Nationals as a performer. She also edited the school literary magazine, Glyph. At this time she also found bicycle travel and went on her first trip: down the Pacific Coast. She was a founding member of the Chainbreaker Collective, Santa Fe's first and only community bike shop.

She spent a few years traveling and working odd jobs before earning her MFA in Creative Writing (poetry and nonfiction) with special focuses on publishing and travel writing at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. She edited the literary magazine, Fourth River, and was awarded best cross-genre thesis and was a finalist for best overall thesis. During this time, she wrote her first book, The Glossary of Tania Aebi, which was published in 2011.

While earning her MFA, she interned at Autumn House Press, which quickly turned into a position as Associate Editor, as well as Editor of their online publication Coal Hill Review. She volunteered with Lime Hawk Press, an online journal, and built a name as an astute editor and prolific writer. She was asked to step in as a guest lecturer for undergraduate and graduate classes, and hosted a weekly educational vlog on poetry.

She taught creative writing classes at the Community College of Allegheny College for a number of years while maintaining a variety of other jobs and navigating her way around the world of freelance writing and editing. She built a stable of repeat clients and edited her first full-length book, a historical fiction novel about a WWII soldier. She became the North and Central America Regional Editor at Pink Pangea in 2015, a year-long contract that gave her an inside look and education into commercial editing and SEO. In 2016, she attempted and completed the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which she paid for by selling stories to ESPN, Sierra, Roads and Kingdoms, and more.

In 2018, she moved back to Pittsburgh to start as Web Editor at Dirt Rag magazine, the iconic mountain bike magazine, and within a few months took over as Editor-in-Chief. When the magazine succumbed to the economic problems of the times, she pivoted to supporting mental health professionals discover their ideal clients and business model and showcase that work to the world. As this was also the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she also sold stories as a freelance journalist about her community, focusing on mutual aid and stories of positive impact.

In 2021, She started at Adventure Cycling Association as Editor-in-Chief of Adventure Cyclist magazine. With news of a significant budget cut on her shoulders soon after taking the reins, she used that motivation to redesign and rebrand the magazine in a way that completely transformed the content and the messaging of the platform. Along with her Art Director Ally Mabry, they created mission statements and vision statements for the magazine; Carolyne developed new columns and created a system to ensure a broader range of readers could see themselves reflected in the content of the magazine, and Ally took the vision to new heights to design a cohesive template that connected the organization's legacy as route creators and storytellers with a modern aesthetic. They also upgraded their digital presence as best they could with no additional investment, taking the magazine from a flat PDF to an interactive and tactile reading experience that was adaptive for large-print readers.

With news of another organizational pivot on the horizon, Carolyne (and the rest of the magazine team) stepped away from Adventure Cyclist. The announcement of resignation brought a wave of readers and magazine writers asking for help transforming their writing the way she helped the authors she published at her magazines. This need caused her to launch the retreat she'd long dreamed of hosting, as well as officially start a business to support writers at all stages of their career or writing journey who are interested in diving deeper into their storytelling and exploration of the transcendent power of bicycle travel and adventure writing.

While earning her MFA, Carolyne interned at Autumn House Press, which quickly turned into a position as Associate Editor, as well as Editor of their online publication Coal Hill Review. She volunteered with Lime Hawk Press, an online journal, and built a name as an astute editor and prolific writer. She was asked to step in as a guest lecturer for undergraduate and graduate classes, hosted a weekly educational vlog on poetry, and taught creative writing classes at the Community College of Allegheny College.

While visiting New Mexico for a college reunion in 2014, she met with then-Editor for Outside Magazine, Jonah Ogles, who shared with her some key advice about getting started: "You're a great writer, but you don't know what you're doing." Of course, he was right. He explained the need to start small and local, and to look at stories from two angles at once: the personal and the global. Who is this story impacting, and how does it stretch out to be meaningful to the wider readership? She took this advice to heart, quit her job at a birth center, and got to work seriously building her freelance career.

While she made some serious stumbles at the start, she learned from each mistake and refused to give up. She built a stable of repeat clients and edited her first full-length book, a historical fiction novel about a WWII soldier. She became the North and Central America Regional Editor at Pink Pangea in 2015, a year-long contract that gave her an inside look and education into commercial editing and SEO. In 2016, she attempted and completed the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which she paid for by selling stories to ESPN, Sierra, Roads and Kingdoms, and more.

In 2018, she moved back to Pittsburgh to start as Web Editor at Dirt Rag magazine, the iconic mountain bike magazine, and within a few months took over as Editor-in-Chief. When the magazine succumbed to the economic problems of the times, she pivoted to supporting mental health professionals discover their ideal clients and business model and showcase that work to the world. As this was also the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she also sold stories as a freelance journalist about her community, focusing on mutual aid and stories of positive impact.

Carolyne has been an educator for most of her life. In high school, she was a peer leader for younger kids, and hosted a monthly performance night at her parents house where people from any social circle could attend, perform, give/receive feedback, and feel supported. Attending Creative Writing and Expression workshops hosted by her mentor Amy Carpenter were transformative, giving her both an outlet and a purpose. She also took the kindness with which Amy and Carolyne's peers discussed people's work to heart, and has infused that into all the workshops she's attended since, from college to graduate school and beyond.

Carolyne loves mentoring and offering support beyond paid opportunities and beyond the classroom. She taught bike mechanic classes in Santa Fe, New York, and Pittsburgh, and coached a street hockey team she put together with board neighborhood kids in Jamaica Plain, Boston. She currently volunteers with Writing Coaches of Montana, stepping into public school classrooms to offer one-on-one writing coaching for students working on assignments. It makes sense, then, that her favorite part of the job as a magazine editor was working with writers to help them see their own stories come to life, to find the personal and the global in their own essays and articles, and mentor them into a career as a writer. The work that Carolyne took 20 years to figure out on her own — with the help of many people along the way — she could do with individuals over the course of a few months, now that she knew the insights worth savoring.

The announcement of resignation from Adventure Cyclist brought a wave of readers and magazine writers asking for help transforming their writing the way she helped the authors she published at her magazines. What started as helping a single reader with a blog became a business to support writers at all stages of their career or writing journey. Now, through one-on-one coaching and her writing retreats, she helps writers at all levels of experience who are interested in diving deeper into their storytelling and exploration of the transcendent power of adventure writing.

Carolyne has been the recipient of many awards for her writing. As she's been writing for her entire life, this list is non-exhaustive but presented as a general representation of and created off the top of her head:

Third Place, National Slam Poetry Competition (Youth)

Best Poetry Thesis (undergrad)

Best Cross-Genre Thesis (MFA)

Nominee, Pushcart

Best of the Web

Jan-Ai Fellowship - Murphy Writing Workshops

Walt Whitman Award

Lucille Clifton Award

BNY Mellon grant

The Hillary Gravendyk Memorial Scholarship - Community of Writers

Vermont Studio Center Full Merit Fellowship, 4-week attendance

Her work has also been republished in Voices from the Rust Belt, a "best of" anthology from Belt magazine, as well as in Anyone Can Write, Volume 4, alongside writers such as Roxane Gay and Michelle Obama. These aren't awards, but are cherished like prizes.

HIGHER EDUCATION

BA: Creative Writing (Poetry and Fiction), Political Science (Labor Studies), 2004, College of Santa Fe

MFA: Creative Writing (Poetry and Nonfiction; Certificates in Publishing and Travel Writing), 2009, Chatham University

CONTINUING EDUCATION

Grant Writing Certificate, 2010, Community College of Allegheny College

DEI Training: Dismantling Institutional Racism in Nonprofits, 2022

Adobe Essentials: Indesign Training Certificate, 2022, Adobe

Crowd Management Certificate, 2025, Fire Marshall Support Services

Certified Trauma-Informed Coach, 2025, Centre for Healing

WORKSHOPS

A Room of Her Own Foundation (scholarship)

Community of Writers (scholarship)

Tupelo Press Truchas Workshop (scholarship)

Murphy Writing (scholarship)

Vermont Studio Center (scholarship)