Jazz pianist, vocalist, composer and author Carolyn Wilkins is a Professor of Ensembles at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Her performance experience includes radio and television appearances with her group SpiritJazz, a concert tour of South America as a Jazz Ambassador for the US State Department, performances as a percussionist with the Pittsburgh Symphony under Andre Previn and in shows featuring Melba Moore, Nancy Wilson and the Fifth Dimension. Carolyn has performed at Boston's Regattabar, Scullers' Grille, the Globe Jazz Festival and the Many Colors of a Woman Jazz Festival. She has appeared in concert at Harvard, Brandeis and Boston Universities, and has also been featured four times as a part of Boston's annual First Night Celebration.

A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music, Carolyn is the author of two books - Tips for Singers: Performing, Auditioning and Rehearsing, and Damn Near White: An African American Family's Rise from Slavery to Bitter-Sweet Success.

In 1989, Carolyn developed a 45 minute "concert-lecture" designed to introduce an audience aged 2 to 92 to some of jazz's greatest composers, their music and the times they lived in. For the past ten years, she has given concert-lectures on "What Is This Thing Called Jazz - a History from New Orleans to Coltrane", "Black Women in Jazz" and "The Roots of Jazz - African Music, Spirituals and the Blues" for enthusiastic audiences in libraries, schools and colleges.

Carolyn Wilkins has released four critically acclaimed CD's of her original compositions entitled SpiritJazz I, SpiritJazz II, Healin' Time and Praise Song on Tiphareth Records. A swinging pianist /vocalist in the tradition of Diana Krall, Shirley Horne and Nina Simone, Carolyn's fresh and memorable songs treat subjects as diverse as sex, satire and spirituality with warmth and humor. Carolyn has composed music for The Search Goes On , an original musical which was performed at First Night 2000, for the NPR adaptation of Langston Hughes' Tell Your Mama, poet Phil Bryant's Southside Suite, and for Return, a Meditational Journey of Self Discovery for Black Women. The Wright College Choir, the Mt. St. Joseph Chorale, the Emmanuel College Singers, and the Shiloh Gospel Choir have also performed Carolyn's compositions. Carolyn performs her jazz-influenced spiritual music weekly in her role as Music Director for the Jazz Worship Service at the First Church in Cambridge, MA.