Carol Bly (April 16, 1930 – December 21, 2007) was a teacher and an award-winning American author of short stories, essays, and nonfiction works on writing. Her work often featured Minnesota women who must identify the moral crisis that is facing their community or themselves and enact change through empathy, or opening one's eyes to the realities of the situation.

Carolyn McLean Bly was the youngest child and only daughter of Charles Russell and Mildred Washburn Mclean of Duluth, Minnesota. She was raised in Duluth and Tryon, North Carolina, where she was sent to live with one of her father's sisters because her mother suffered from tuberculosis and was often away from the family being treated in sanitariums.

Bly's mother died in 1942, at a time when two of her older brothers were fighting in World War II. As a young teen, Bly worried for the safety of her family and often had nightmares about the Gestapo. Bly never lost her preoccupation with the damage that evil people could do.

After graduating from the Abbot Academy boarding school Bly received her B.A. in English and history from Wellesley College in 1951 and spent several years working in New York and Boston before undertaking graduate-level work at the University of Minnesota in 1954 and 1955.

Carol Theresa East (born 15 January 1959, Kingston, Jamaica), known by her stage name of Sister Carol, is a Jamaican reggae recording artist.

When she was 14, her family immigrated to Brooklyn, New York. East soon became involved in the Jamaican music scene. She earned a degree in education from the City College of New York in 1981, the same year she gave birth to her first child. Around that time she met Brigadier Jerry, a Jamaican DJ, who encouraged her to try DJ chatting in Jamaican dancehall style, rather than singing.

After winning competitions in New York and Jamaica, she toured with The Meditations. Her first album, Liberation for Africa, was released in 1983, as a limited edition on the Jamaican SG label. The 1984 album Black Cinderella established her. She formed her own record label, also called Black Cinderella.

East has appeared in the Jonathan Demme movies Something Wild (1986), Married to the Mob (1988), and Rachel Getting Married (2008).

Sister Carol also had many stage names for example; Black Cinderella and Mother Culture.