Background
Carey grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut.
Carey grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut.
He attended the Loomis School (now Loomis-Chaffee) and then Harvard University.
The New York Times called Against the Tide "deep ecological journalism at its best, an effective and compassionate chronicle of a threatened way of life, and a worthy successor to such classic portraits of American fishermen as William West. Warner"s Beautiful Swimmers and Peter Matthiessen"s Men"s Lives". He worked various low-paying jobs before teaching for ten years in the Yup"ik Eskimo villages of southwest Alaska, where he learned the Yup"ik language (Yugtun). He published magazine articles about his experiences in Alaska in Country Journal, Alaska, the Boston Globe Magazine, Harvard Magazine, and the Massachusetts Review.
He also published general interest material in Yankee and New England Monthly.
Carey’s first book, Raven’s Children: An Alaskan Culture at Twilight, was published in 1992 (). Honored as a 1992 New York Public Library "Book to Remember", this chronicled a summer spent living, hunting, and fishing in Kongiganak and Bethel, Alaska, with a Yup’ik family.
The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire was published in 2005 (). This describes the natural history of the sturgeon and provides a history and globetrotting portrait of the caviar industry: its fishermen, brokers, chefs, smugglers, watchdogs, and aquaculturists.
The book was excerpted in Harvard Magazine.
Carey has also published short fiction, most recently in Hunger Mountain, the VCFA Journal of the Arts: "Our Own Version of Iowa" and "Ruby Thursday". His next book of nonfiction, In the Evil Day: Violence Comes to One Small Town, describes a 1997 shooting rampage in Colebrook, New Hampshire. The book will by published in October, 2015, by the University Press of New England.
Carey currently lives in Sandwich, New Hampshire and teaches in Southern New Hampshire University’s Master of Fine Arts in Fiction and Nonfiction program
He is the father of "Gaelic Americana" singer/songwriter Kyle Carey.