On August 6, 2025, the McKnight Foundation named Carolyn Holbrook its 2025 Distinguished Artist, Minnesota’s highest honor for an individual artist, recognizing a lifetime of achievement and leadership in Minnesota’s cultural arts.

Carolyn Holbrook’s career embodies that vision. A celebrated writer, educator, and arts leader, she has spent decades creating spaces where Black, Indigenous, and other writers of color can share their stories on their own terms. Her essays and nonfiction explore history, family, and the ongoing work of racial justice, while her teaching and public programs have nurtured generations of emerging writers.

Carolyn founded MTASS to bring writers and readers together for conversations that center BIPOC voices and complicate any “single story” about our communities. Through salons, panel conversations, and writer gatherings, the series has become a trusted home for nuanced dialogue about literature, race, place, and belonging in Minnesota and beyond.

Her leadership continues to guide More Than a Single Story as we expand our programs and create new opportunities for writers of color at all stages of their careers.

We invite our community to join us in congratulating Carolyn Holbrook on this well-deserved honor and in continuing the work that the Distinguished Artist Award recognizes: telling stories that transform how we see one another, our histories, and our shared future.