Casey Golomski

Casey Golomski is an award-winning creative writer and cultural and medical anthropologist. His research centers perennial questions about life, death, and their thresholds, asking how people work through and memorialize critical events in their lives and communities. Aside from authoring many academic and literary publications, Golomski's been interviewed for and cited by media outlets such as the New York Times, New Hampshire Public Radio, New Hampshire Magazine, AlexNews, Times of eSwatini, and Business Times.

Rich in mystery and life's lessons, his latest book God's Waiting Room is an innovation in creative nonfiction that flips the script on racial discrimination in long-term care, showing how older 'racist' whites and their Black nurses find grace together among their ghosts and despite the odds. Set thirty years after apartheid, it features the untold story of Nelson Mandela's Robben Island Prison nurse as well as stories of queer older adults and healthcare providers, teaching us how racism, ageism, and sexism impact where we end up, who cares, and what matters in the end. Release date Dec. 5, 2024 with Rutgers U Press for North American and Rest of World rights, and African rights to Wits University Press.

His other major writings include a critical first edition of the rediscovered and sole-surviving book manuscript of Regina Twala, one of the first Black African women anthropologists, a collaboration with Joel Cabrita and Nosipho Mngomezulu, as well as his book Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom by Indiana U Press, the first full documentary account of the AIDS epidemic in Eswatini, Africa's last absolute monarchy and the country with the world's highest HIV prevalence for more than 15 years. A moving, memorable story of people's families, churches, and businesses, Funeral Culture shows how grassroots responses to disease epidemics, whether AIDS or COVID, drive local innovations and counter conservatives' culture wars.

Funded by three Fulbright Fellowships, the Wenner Gren, Reed, Mellon, and Teagle Foundations, and institutional awards and grants, his research and creative writing has been published in a range of anthropology, social science, Black and African studies, and literary journals and volumes. He was also awarded the Society for Humanistic Anthropology First Prize in Poetry. As an invited speaker on his writing and research, he has given talks at Emory, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Boston, Michigan State, Oslo, Zürich, and the Universities of Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal, Witwatersrand and Pretoria in South Africa, where he is also an ongoing visiting researcher.

Currently he is a board member for the journal Anthropology and Humanism and the Seacoast African American Cultural Center (SAACC) in Portsmouth, NH where he supervises internships and public cultural education through curation of their collections. For his contributions to SAACC, he also received a state-wide Spirit of NH Volunteer Service Award.