Caroline Clarke has held several key positions, including executive editor and editorial director, at Black Enterprise, a multi-media company. Caroline also hosted the syndicated television show Black Enterprise Business Report and launched Black Enterprise Books, a series of ten business and investing books co-published with John Wiley & Sons. Prior to joining Black Enterprise, Caroline was a staff writer at The American Lawyer and several other newspapers. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College and a master’s degree with honors from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Caroline is on the boards of Spence Chapin Family Services (the century-old nonprofit agency that handled her adoption) and the BE BRIDGE Foundation, which helps fund existing programs dedicated to enriching the lives of black youth.
Caroline lives in New York and is a passionate advocate for adoption. Her new book, Postcards from Cookie, is a surprising and moving memoir by an adopted child who as an adult went looking for information on her biological family—and discovered to her shock that she was in fact the long-lost granddaughter of Nat “King” Cole. Award-winning journalist Caroline Clarke was, as a newborn, was adopted in an era when adoptions were shameful and secret and sealed. Whether you were giving up your baby or gaining one, you were urged to forget the whole process the moment it ended. As an adult, now married with two children, Caroline developed a small list of health concerns. Worried about their potential impact on her young family, she sought out her medical history.
Limited information provided by the agency that had handled her adoption led her to quickly realize that the family that gave her up was that of the iconic crooner and pianist Nat “King” Cole, whose music had actually filled Caroline’s life as she was growing up. Nat’s daughter Cookie had given Caroline up for adoption years before because of the embarrassment Nat’s wife felt it would bring the family. The memoir traces the heartfelt reuniting of these two women—at first, almost entirely by the postcards they mail each other; the joy Caroline finds in finally meeting her long-lost relatives, including Natalie Cole and Nat’s brother Freddy Cole, and introducing them to her own children; and the pain that comes when tragedy separates Cookie and Caroline one more time. Bringing up family, celebrity, secrets, motherhood, and the many reasons children of adoption seek out their biological families, Postcards from Cookie is poignant and life-affirming in turns. The photo here of Caroline Clarke is by Chandra Lanier.