CAROLE GARRISON is a wanderer. Throughout her life, she has traveled extensively around the world, working and living in Southeast Asia. In Europe, she experienced Western history and explored her family heritage. In Asia, she felt a deep aesthetic and spiritual attraction to the region. Carole traveled to Turkey, where she admired the Blue Mosque and the Bosporus harbor; enjoyed the vibrant energy of Moscow; explored Mongolia, a nation neighboring China and Russia, known for its expansive, rugged terrain and nomadic heritage; and explored Fiji, an island nation in Melanesia, within Oceania, located approximately 1,100 nautical miles north-northeast of New Zealand. Wherever she went, she formed bonds with the people, their culture, and their aspirations. Many of these connections have endured for decades despite the passage of time and distance.
Carole began writing about her travels as simple journals, using them to process and make sense of her experiences. Since she wasn’t skilled with a camera, she relied on words to document her journeys. As her travel writings gained a dedicated audience, her work became more refined and focused, eventually filling her blogs and books with stories of her adventures. Over time, she also took hundreds of photographs during her trips.
Carole’s career path was far from straightforward. After college and a period as a suburban housewife and mother in Miami, Florida, she moved to Georgia with her two young daughters, Debra and Samantha. In the early 1970s, she joined the Atlanta Bureau of Police Services as one of the few female officers, but later transitioned into education after earning her Master of Public Administration from Georgia State University’s evening program. Throughout her career in education, she conducted research on women’s roles in policing, helped establish The University of Akron’s Women’s Studies Program, enhanced services for women in the city, and even traveled to Cambodia to assist in overseeing the country’s first democratic election.
After completing her Ph.D. at Ohio State University, Carole taught courses in Corrections, Criminal Justice, and Public Administration at Kean College in New Jersey. She spent time with inmates who initiated the first Scared Straight program at Rahway State Prison and conducted research on juvenile crime and substance abuse. In 1981, she joined the University of Akron’s Department of Criminal Justice as a faculty member. Her research was practical and applicable, focusing on topics such as the connection between drugs and crime among adolescents, community perceptions of policewomen, and the employment of female officers in Ohio. Due to her expertise, she was one of only thirty criminal justice professionals invited to serve on the review committee for Ohio’s proposed police certification curriculum.
Soon after arriving at the University of Akron, a small group of women, including Carole, began developing a Women’s Studies program at the university. The process took time, as the group needed to create a strong academic proposal and build support across campus. Carole became the program’s first director.
During her tenure as director, Carole strengthened her community connections. She helped establish the Women’s History Project of the Akron Area and served on the boards of the Rape Crisis Center and the National Women’s Studies Association. She was appointed by President Bush to the U.S. Defense Department’s Committee on Women in the Service and later by President Clinton to the committee’s executive board. Carole was Associate Director of the Kent State/University of Akron Institute for the Study of Gender and Education and a member of the National Council for Research on Women. She was also the first Co-Vice Chair of Ohio’s State Women’s Commission and served on the Research Advisory Board for the Ohio Department of Corrections as well as the Summit County Domestic Violence Taskforce.
In 1992, Carole traveled to Cambodia to oversee the country’s first democratic election. She lived in a remote village for thirteen months, establishing polling stations and managing voter registration. After returning to Akron in 1993 to teach, she returned to Cambodia three years later as the executive director of the Cooperation Committee for Cambodia, a coalition of humanitarian and development NGOs. While there, Carole adopted her six-year-old daughter, Tevi Seng.
Carole relocated to Ona, West Virginia, to be close to her family. Although retired from her role as chair of the Department of Criminal Justice and Police Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, she continues to teach online courses in applied ethics and policing. Outside of teaching and writing, Carole served on the executive board of Friends of WV Public Broadcasting, chairs the board of Unlimited Future—a local business incubator in Huntington, WV—was a docent at the Huntington Museum of Art, and participated in the Huntington Women’s Leadership Caucus. She has also served as a member of the Cabell County School Board and volunteered as a fourth-grade reading mentor at Altizer Elementary School.
Carole went back to Georgia in 2020. She has written four books: THE CHRISTMAS NEST (2025), a children’s Kindle ebook; THE WANDERER (2020), a travelogue; THE FOURTH MOMENT, JOURNEYS FROM THE KNOWN TO THE UNKNOWN (2017), which is a memoiristic-travelogue; and THE RESCUE OF BALANGODA (2016), a children’s paperback book.