CELEBRATE EVERY IMPERFECTION

Carlene Thissen is an American author, singer-songwriter, and storyteller whose life has moved through several full circles: from folk singer to corporate executive, to advocate for Florida’s farmworker community, and now to children’s book author.

Born on June 28, 1950, in Andover, New Jersey, Carlene came of age as a guitar-playing folk singer in the 1960s and ’70s. She counts the three days she spent at the 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Fair among the best of her life, an experience she still shares today through a multimedia program, and one she captured in her autobiographical song “Back There Again,” in which she describes how she “cut her hair and got a career, and lost herself for 30 odd years.”

That career took her far from her early dream of practicing medicine in underserved communities. Instead, she became a respected voice in marketing technology, writing articles and books on the subject, producing a popular monthly business newsletter, and authoring some of the first technology primers for the supermarket industry. She rose to Vice President at a major market research firm in Chicago, before founding her own international consulting company and eventually settling in Naples, Florida.

A series of events she describes as God-driven led her back to music and to a new calling, volunteering as a music teacher for preschoolers and singing in the choir in the agricultural community of Immokalee, Florida. Her love for the farmworker community there inspired two books, Immokalee’s Fields of Hope and Called From Silence: The Father Sanders Story, along with several original songs. She later worked at the University of Florida’s Research and Education Center in Immokalee, developing courses to help crew leaders keep farmworkers safe and treated fairly, deepening a perspective she continues to write from today.

Carlene’s newest project, the Disheveled Snowman series, began as a whimsical string of Facebook posts one Christmas, after she rescued a forlorn stuffed snowman from a garage sale and started imagining his search for a place to belong. What began as homemade, ribbon-bound keepsake books for friends and family grew, by popular request, into a full series, including a musical collaboration with songwriter Carol Nicodemi.
Carlene holds a B.A. in Business Administration from the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota (1982), and an M.A. in History from Florida International University (2005). Her graduate thesis research focused on Mexican, Haitian, and Guatemalan immigrants in Immokalee, Florida. She continues to write, sing, and perform at house concerts, clubs, festivals, and charity events near her home in Naples, Florida.