Carolyn figured out early on how to entertain the public with her words. As a child, she wrote and directed summer plays, which she and her pals performed for the neighbourhood parents— for profit, of course. Miffed that she was too young to fully partake in the hippie landscape, she decided to live it, vicariously, through the written word. At 12, she wrote an endless tome about a generation of teens living parent-free on a commune. The weekly installments, peppered with scenes of sex, drugs, and rock and roll were read aloud to an eager sisterhood of neighbourhood friends— among them, Nicole Gendron and Maryse Lesperance. (Some five years later, at the author's request, those same kids were summoned to help shred, burn, and feed the drivel into the sewer.) Many of the memories growing up here have resurfaced in one form or another in Carolyn's literary work, most notably in October (Nuage Editions, 1999), set against the backdrop of the events of the 1970 October Crisis during which Pierre Laporte, St-Lambert resident and then-Minister of Labour in the Quebec government, was snatched from the street outside his home and killed a week later by the notorious FLQ. Excerpts from that book earned her a spot on the shortlist for the CBC Literary Awards Competition in 1999, and later represented Montreal in a display celebrating “Montreal World Book Capital” in 2005-2006. She was first a student at Victoria Park (now The Alternate School), then at St-Lambert Elementary before attending Chambly County in 1972. It was at Brownie summer camp just after grade 5 that she first met Joanne Beauchamp, with whom she instantly bonded and spent the bulk of her high school years. From the get-go, Carolyn excelled in English. She credits Stanley MacDonald for “opening the door” in her junior years, and Robert West, for keeping the door open in grades 10 and 11 with his brilliant wit and challenging essay topics. To this day, she attributes her final mark of 96% on the grade 10 algebra provincial, not to any inherent skill in math, but to the thoughtful and methodical teaching of Carolyn Ross (later Gould).

A bona fide “nerd” in school, Carolyn was never one to give up good study time for extra-curricular activities, except for a few hours selling Bookroom supplies (with Joanne Beauchamp and Myrna Peterkin) and Friday night square-dancing at the St-Lambert United Church with some of her core gang. Her highlight was graduation fever, when the walls between cliques came down, and “even the cool kids” came to her 3 AM party. That year, she took home the Gold Birks medal for outstanding academic achievement before heading off to Marianopolis College to study Social Sciences.

Carolyn earned an Honours Bachelor degree in English Literature from McGill University in 1981, and got accepted that same year into McGill Law School, only to drop out after one semester. She spent the rest of that year clerking at the now-defunct W.H. Smith Bookstore on Ste-Catherine Street, biding her time until she could begin a one-year Diploma in Education (specializing in English and ESL) – something she had always longed to do. That demanding year at McGill included a four-week student teaching practicum at Chambly County (under the watchful tutelage of Robert Hawley) and a five-week one in Salluit, an isolated Inuit community in Northern Quebec (now Nunavik), where she fell in love with the “other” culture. Carolyn's three years (1983-1986) teaching elementary school in two Inuit settlements north of the treeline – Kangirsuk and Akulivik—would later become fodder for another book of poetry, Snow Formations, published in 2002 by Signature Editions. Up north, she met Michel Gagnon, a French teacher from Windsor Quebec, to whom she was married for 19 years.

Upon her return from the north, Carolyn travelled solo to Europe and decided, rather haphazardly, that the writing she had given up in her youth was calling her back. Giving in to her passion, she made a conscious decision to build up her writing credentials and permanently move teaching to the backseat. From 1986 to 1990, she divided her time between supply teaching, teaching adult education, and freelancing for various publications, including Today's Parent Magazine, where she spent a year as an education columnist.

In 1991, after one too many editors slashed the most inventive bits of her journalism, she enrolled at Concordia University in the Masters program for Creative Writing. The degree, which took five years to complete and included the David McKeen Award for best thesis of the year, was Carolyn's official “passport” to the Montreal literary scene. The thesis, called Hollow Grass, went on to become Swimming into the Light (1995) her first published book of poetry, loosely based on an experience travelling to her ancestral Lebanon in the aftermath of the civil war to adopt her infant son, Fady Magid (later Charles-Alexandre Gagnon), in 1992.

Since 1995, she has authored 6 books of poetry and edited two. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and Arabic, and has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards including the Pat Lowther Memorial Award (best poetry book by a Canadian woman) and the A.M. Klein Prize (best English language book of poetry in Quebec). It has also been produced for CBC-Radio, and has appeared nationally and internationally, most recently in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (Norton & Co., 2008). For six months in 2005, her work was displayed on billboards at Outremont, Mont-Royal, and Place des Arts metro stations as part of a unique project called La poésie prend le métro.

In 2004, she teamed up with former Vehicule poet Endre Farkas (the Vehicules were one of the most important experimental groups to burst onto the Canadian poetry scene in the 70s and 80s) to found Poésie en mouvement / Poetry in Motion, an organization dedicated to moving poetry off the page and into public spaces. That April, for National Poetry Month, they put the poems of 10 anglophone poets and 10 francophone poets aboard 800 Montreal buses. And in 2005, they produced the Cirque des mots / Circus of Words, a multilingual, multi-disciplinary cabaret of performance poetry, which they have been curating now for four years. The show has featured top poet-performers from Canada and elsewhere, including Quebec's own maudit-poet himself, Lucien Francoeur. Carolyn has appeared at many literary festivals across Canada, including Montreal's Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, the Festival international de la poésie in Trois-Rivières, the Winnipeg International Writers' Festival, and Alberta LitFest. She has been a guest on Global TV, CBC Radio, and TVOntario. In 2005, she part of a special delegation of Canadian poets invited to Paris to participate in the 4th International Symposium Against Isolation, a four-day forum on the inhumane treatment of prisoners of conscience in Turkey and elsewhere. There, to a packed 500-seat auditorium, she and Farkas performed a bilingual two-voice text they wrote, based on the words of prisoners of conscience whose diary entries had been smuggled out of Turkish jails.

Since that event, Carolyn has become a firm believer that artists have an important role to play in the discussion of what unfolds on the international stage: Recently, she and Farkas ventured into murky waters with Blood is Blood, a collaborative work set in the troubled Middle East, whose narrative can be applied to similar tribal wars that have wreaked havoc around the globe. Since it was first aired on CBC Radio in December 2006, it has been performed in different incarnations at a number of events—at peace concerts, interfaith gatherings, and literary festivals — and has always provoked reaction. This, she has taken, as a sign that genuine dialogue on slippery terrain is possible.

Closer to home, she was one of the founding members of the grassroots citizens' group that vehemently opposed and overturned the forced municipal merger of St-Lambert with Longueuil. Despite her literary travels, she still lives here in the city where she grew up, but closer to “the village” where she is currently teaching her 16-year-old son to drive.

Carolyn is the three-time recipient of professional grants to writers (Canada Council and the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec) and is a member of the Quebec Writers' Federation and the League of Canadian Poets, where she served on the 2005-2006 National Council as the elected representative for Quebec and Nunavut. A creative freelancer, she juggles editing, journalism, teaching and book reviewing to support her nasty poetic habit.