Carolyn Brady, Miss Maine 2019- our state's first-ever African American Miss Maine- has to be one of the most motivated and active people of my acquaintance! Between her Miss Maine duties, working as an AmeriCorps volunteer at Howard C. Reiche Elementary School in Portland, teaching spin classes at Cyclebar in Portland, and practicing her violin...well, I don't know where she gets the energy! 

When Carolyn came to Maine from Philadelphia to attend Bowdoin College, she came with a lot of academic ambition and a gift for the violin, which she’d been playing since she was 5. But a suggestion from a former Miss Maine contestant who saw her playing with Bowdoin’s symphony set her on a path to pageantry and led to her becoming Miss Maine. December 2019 saw her heading to Connecticut to represent the state in the Miss America 2.0 pageant at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville (it aired on NBC).

Her long term goals are a career with the U.S. State Department, and her hope would be an assignment in China, where she spent the summer after her freshman year. “I just ended up falling in love with Chinese culture,” she says. (And also with the language, which she minored in at Bowdoin along with majoring in government and legal studies.)

2019 was a busy year for Carolyn. She graduated from Bowdoin in the spring and started teaching math and literacy at Reiche Elementary school in Portland that fall. Always one to stay busy, Carolyn often works retail jobs, participates in philanthropy work as Miss Maine- including with Catholic Charities Maine and Gateway Community Services-  and also teaches spin classes at CycleBar in Portland, where I caught up with her. Multitask much? “I am like the poster child for young America,” she says.