Carole Vasta Folley
Carole Vasta Folley is an award-winning playwright, columnist and writer living in Vermont. She is an epiphany chaser, a lover of phrases that create goosebumps and a stalwart devotee of the power of the written word. A long way from a stuttering girl who rarely spoke, turns out Carole indeed has something to say.
Most recently, Carole’s creative nonfiction work, The Right of Rescission was published by Hippocampus Magazine. She is a finalist for the Vermont Writer’s Prize, the Writer’s Digest 93rd Annual Writing Competition and the 2025 Women on Writing’s Creative Nonfiction competition. Carole is currently writing her memoir.
As a playwright, Carole is reviewed as having the “storyteller gift.” Her work in both comedy and drama speaks to the themes of belonging and “the complicated ways we connect.” Notably, her plays feature older women, fulfilling her mission to create leading roles for women of all ages.
Carole’s two-woman play, The Seymour Sisters, was recently named the Vermont State Winner by the Clauder Competition, New England's most prestigious playwriting award. The Seymour Sisters was developed with support from the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and the Vermont Community Foundation’s Arts Endowment Fund.
Carole’s other plays include Pronouncing Glenn, The Family of Ewe, Alumni Pie, Borrowing Time, Lunch Money and The Sleepover ~ A Comedy of Marriage, which won the 2015 Vermont Playwrights Award.
Her newest work, Control Top, received the VAC People’s Choice Award Creation Grant in 2024 and was created with the support of the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Community Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
As a columnist, Carole’s award-winning In Musing column, now in its ninth year of publication, has consistently won numerous awards in the “humor” and “serious” categories over the years from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, the Vermont Press Association and the New England Newspaper & Press Association.
Carole is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Honor Roll Playwrights and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
The Giantess - Carole, 2020
Misoo Bang
Acrylic paint and collage on panel, 36” x 48”
The Giantess Series
Artist Misoo Bang’s The Giantess Series portrays monumental women who offer alternative representations of power while they prevail over landscapes, industry, people and animals. Bang works with survivors of gender-based violence, whose inner Giantess is released during the transformative acts of collaboration and painting. To see more of Misoo Bang’s work visit misoo.org.
When I first encountered Misoo's Giantess series, it took my breath away. I immediately knew her work represented freedom and the kind of power that comes from owning one's self. The power of no longer being a victim. This is no small thing.
Trauma is a wily thing. It’s taken me on a wild ride through decades of my life - some I no longer remember, some I wish I didn't remember, and others where survival was just about white-knuckling day by day. Growing up a victim of sexual abuse, I never had a chance to see who I was without trauma. A topic I wrote about in The Seymour Sisters. Many of my plays and much of my CNF speaks to the other impacts of abuse and neglect, from feeling motherless to the human need to belong.
The fact that I ended up being one of Misoo's Giantess series’ subjects is sheerly inexplicable alchemy. It happened at just the right time, exactly when I began tearing down walls, facing childhood strategies that I thought kept me safe and thus finding my voice.
Now, I have the tremendous privilege of having my own Giantess to remind me of who I can be.
One who looks just like me - but is unafraid to be fierce. I am humbled. I am strengthened.
Bessel van der Kolk M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score, wrote, “Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, and calm..." It is that self the artist Misoo captures - as if she wrote a permission slip from some higher entity that gave me agency and, yes, confidence, curiosity and calm. ~ CVF