“Carrie sees the beauty of everyday life before it comes into view, sees it before the rest of us do. Beyond life's broken facades, she manages to get a look at what Thomas Merton called the 'hidden wholeness,' then shows us what she's seen so we can see it, too.” -Parker J. Palmer, 2018 Contemplative Voices Award recipient
Carrie Newcomer is a performer, recording artist, and educator, described as a “prairie mystic” by the The Boston Globe. She has 17 nationally released albums, including The Point of Arrival, The Beautiful Not Yet, A Permeable Life, and Everything is Everywhere, and has also released two companion books of poetry and essays, A Permeable Life: Poems and Essays and The Beautiful Not Yet: Poems, Essays, & Lyrics.
Her song “I Should've Known Better” appeared on Nickel Creek's Grammy award-winning gold-certified album, “This Side,” and she earned a regional Emmy for the PBS special, “An Evening with Carrie Newcomer.” Recent media appearances include PBS's Religion and Ethics and Krista Tippett's On Being. In the fall of 2009 and 2011 Newcomer was a cultural ambassador to India, invited by the American Embassy of India, resulting in her interfaith collaborative benefit album, Everything is Everywhere, with world master of the Indian Sarod, Amjad Ali Khan and his sons Ayan and Amaan. In 2012 and 2013 Carrie traveled to Kenya and the Middle East, performing in schools, spiritual communities and AIDS hospitals.
In 2016 Carrie was awarded an honorary degree in Music for Social Change from Goshen College. She regularly works with Parker J. Palmer in live programs, including Healing the Heart of Democracy: A Gathering of Spirits for the Common Good and What We Need is Here: Hope, Hard Times, and Human Possibility. They also are actively collaborating on The Growing Edge, a website, podcast, and retreat. Other special collaborations include presentations with neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, author Rabbi Sandy Sasso, and environmental author Scott Russell Sanders.
