About
An award-winning journalist, civil rights activist and filmmaker, Jim Carrier has written twelve books, been published in the National Geographic and the New York Times, written Denver Post series on the legacy of the atomic bomb and the Marlboro Man, and produced multimedia projects for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has roamed by Jeep through the American West and by sailboat across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. His reporting has been broadcast on NPR, PBS and included in Best American Science and Nature Writing.
Jim’s reporting from the West, as the Rocky Mountain Ranger, took him through 500,000 miles, 7,665 sunsets and 87 pairs of Levis. In 1997, he bought a sailboat, named it Ranger, and set out to sail the Pacific. He diverted to Alabama because of a hate crime against a black man.
Volunteering at the Southern Poverty Law Center, he wrote Ten Ways to Fight Hate, a community guide distributed to one million officials and human rights activists. Carrier developed Tolerance.org, which won two Webbys for activist Web sites and produced the film, Faces in the Water for the Civil Rights Memorial.
Now based in Burlington, Vermont, his freelance work focuses on medical science, sailing and human rights. Carrier is currently at work on a medical memoir about ulcerative colitis, a history of the atomic legacy in the West, and an expose of the Marlboro Man. He and his daughter, Amy, descend from Martha Carrier who was hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. His wife, Trish O’Kane, is a lecturer in environmental studies at the University of Vermont.
Books and Major Media Projects
Letters from Yellowstone, 1987, 2018, Roberts Rinehart, Boulder
Down the Colorado, 1989, Roberts Rinehart, Boulder
Summer of Fire, 1989, Gibbs Smith, Salt Lake City
A River Drained Dry, National Geographic, June 1991
In Search of the Marlboro Man, 1991, The Denver Post
Hush Little Baby, 1992, Pinnacle, New York, and Doubleday True Crime Club
West of the Divide, 1992, Fulcrum, Golden
The Sherpas of the Himalayas, National Geographic December 1992
The Colorado, a River at Risk, 1992, Westcliff, Englewood
The Atomic Legacy of the West, 1995, The Denver Post
Nature’s Life Lessons, 1996, Fulcrum, Golden
Ten Ways to Fight Hate, 2000, 2017 Southern Poverty Law Center (reissued, 5th edition 2017)
The Ship and the Storm, 2000, 2002 International Marine/Harcourt
www.tolerance.org, 2001, Southern Poverty Law Center
A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement, 2004, Harcourt, NY
Faces in the Water, 2005, Southern Poverty Law Center documentary
All You Can Eat, 2011, Ranger Media
Here We Are – The history, magic and meaning of GPS, 2011, Ranger Media
The First Thanksgiving, 2012, Forward Theater Monologue Festival
The Librarian and The Banjo, 2013, documentary
Charity – The Heartbreaking and Heroic Story of Charity Hospital in Hurricane Katrina, 2015 Ranger Media
The Alt-Right on Campus: What Students Need to Know, SPLC 2017
Education/Academic Affiliations
University of Rochester, B.A. Psychology, 1966
Black Hills State College, Journalism Instructor, 1983-84
Oglala Lakota Community College, Mass Communications Instructor, 1984
South Dakota State University, Colorado State University, University of Colorado, Western State College: Visiting lecturer, 1986-1997
Committee on Human Research in Medical Sciences, University of Vermont 2017-present
Employment
Radio newscaster: WTKO Ithaca, WICC Fairfield, Ct. 1966-1971
Associated Press: writer, editor, correspondent 1971-1979
Rapid City (SD) Journal, News Editor 1979-1984
Denver Post, columnist/project writer/roaming correspondent 1984-1997
Freelance Writer, 1997 – present. Clients included The National Geographic, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe.
Southern Poverty Law Center, Director, Tolerance.org, 1999-2002
IntelliTours, GPS-guided audio tours, founder and manager 2003-2014.
Cruising World Magazine, Contributing Editor, 2003-present
Awards
George Moses award for AP staff writing, 1978
First-place AP and SDI for spots news and projects: 1979, 1987 (two), 1991, 1995 (two)
Finalist, Scripps-Howard environmental writing, 1992
Best nonfiction book, Colorado Center for the Book, 1992
Pulitzer Prize nominations, Associated Press, 1970; Denver Post, 1988-1995
Fund for Investigative Journalism, grant to support shrimp investigation 2008.
Appalachian Music Fellow, Berea College, Ky., 2009
Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology 2010 (All You Can Eat).
Society of Environmental Journalists, grant to support CWD investigation 2011.
Signature Grant, Madison Arts Council, The Librarian and The Banjo 2012
Community
The River Food Pantry, board member, volunteer cook, writer, 2007-2012
Wild Warner, cofounder, 2008-2016
WORT – Community Radio, science producer, 2007-2016
Wisconsin Film School (nonprofit), founder, 2008-2016
WYOU – Community Access Television, Board member, 2014-2016
Race to Equity – Northside United steering committee, 2014-2016
Committee on Human Research in Medical Sciences, (IRB) University of Vermont, 2017-present
Healing Winds, Sail Beyond Cancer, sailing captain, Burlington, 2018-present
Meals on Wheels, delivery of weekend meals to 16 clients in Burlington, VT
Contact Information
Jim Carrier
41 Sky Drive, Burlington, VT 05408
802-497-0347 jimcarrier (at) msn.com
Jim is represented by Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.
1501 Broadway, Suite 2310, New York, NY 10036
Phone: 212-840-5760
Featured Work
Charity - The Heroic and Heartbreaking Story of Charity Hospital in Hurricane Katrina
First went the power. Then came the water, and for five days, the country’s oldest hospital was under siege. The never-before-told story of the heroic doctors, nurses, and patients who fought to survive Hurricane Katrina at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.
The story arc traces a remarkable five-day transformation of an infirm institution, caught in a sea of death and indifference, into an island of care and tenderness.
Cut off from medical gizmos, cast loose by government, Charity’s manifest found themselves in a boat together. They did not sink into chaos. They found humankind, affection and love. Only that can explain why Charity, with the sickest of the sick, lost the fewest lives – 8 out of 154 reported deaths at flooded health care institutions. While a euthenasia scandle enveloped Memorial Hospital, and the city’s other corporate hospitals evacuated patients with helicopters, Charity hung on with little more than heart.
Katrina, as storms do, washed away illusions and exposed weaknesses: the levees, the morally gutted police, a rickety infrastructure, a fragile society that had been living for generations on the take and on the come, and a city – and a state and a nation -- that could not, or would not, care for its own. Charity’s frailties were laid bare, too; it was a sick, white elephant.
In the wake of Katrina, with the hospital a dark hot tomb, its staff laid off and dispersing, an official ambivalence about rebuilding Charity eerily echoed the larger debate about rebuilding New Orleans - and provided health care for the indigent.
In retrospect, the sense of doom is excruciating. Having lived through it by evacuating my Lakeview home, having watched (from afar) the storm roar past, and the slow tsunami that drowned my dreams, emptied New Orleans and left Charity art deco carrion, drama is an inadequate word. The hour-by-hour recreation of this hospital’s final days is one of the most grievous and heroic stories in American history.
What survived, and soars, is this: In a dying city and dying hospital, lives were changed. Patients rose up and lived. Doctors, deprived of their technical toys, embraced the patients – for hours on end. Numbers became human beings, on both sides of the air bag. As if struck by angels, people walked out of Charity changed.
