Caroline Clarke is a highly requested speaker, award-winning journalist, moderator and acclaimed author. Take a Lesson: Black Achievers on How They Made It and What They Learned Along the Way is her latest book and was released in February 2022. In 2021, Clarke was featured in CORE magazine’s “100 Most Influential Blacks Today.”
“On the Clock with Caroline Clarke,” earned a 2020 Telly Award for Best Motivational Online Content Series and her 2014 memoir, Postcards from Cookie, was named as Essence’s Best Memoir of the Year.
How did you get your first book deal?
My first book deal was not [a] hard one, because I was the head of Black Enterprise Books … and we decided to publish a series of books, just to expand the brand. The first idea I had for a book was this idea of an oral history. I had read oral histories in college and I loved them. The idea of first-person narrative wasn’t very focused upon and there was something about written oral history that resonated so strongly for me.
We do so much in video now, and video matters, but there is still something very, very distinctive about reading the words of a person who spoke them originally and taking them in visually, as opposed to really seeing and hearing them. So, I wanted to do an oral history of successful Black people, contemporary achievers, and the result was this book, Take a Lesson: Today’s Black Achievers on How they Made it and What they Learned Along the Way.
How did you come up with the idea for Postcards from Cookie?
I found that my biological mother, Cookie Cole, Carol Cole, is Nat King Cole’s first child. Nat King Cole being my grandfather, and Natalie Cole being my aunt is something that I almost never say, when I describe this book. This story, as incredible as it is, wouldn’t have been published without that facet. To me, the stories that are most compelling are the stories of the people we don’t know. Everybody has a story and so many don’t come to light, especially as Black people, because nobody cares. Nobody asks us and we don’t ask some of the people we know best in the world or think we do, what their story really is. That’s what drew me to journalism.
What was your idea behind this new book?
I’ve spent my life interviewing people more than anything. This is a collection of interviews where you get to hear people say the things they said to me. You have an opportunity to feel like you are sitting with Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta. There’s a man named Chaz Howard, who went to the University of Pennsylvania, got kicked out, then went on to get his divinity degree and is now chaplain there at the same university.
