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Caprice Gray

Biography

PROFILE: Caprice Gray rose above her circumstances to attend first a prestigious magnet high school and then Yale University. Growing up in a severely underprivileged community, Caprice has long been troubled by the disparities that existed between her two worlds. She writes of their influence, “I have committed myself to their rectification, to the so-called bridging of the gap...” Caprice’s focus on public health and social disparities stems from her own personal experiences with parents and other family members afflicted with health problems that were a product of both history and environment. Her passion for the written word is as strong as her commitment to humanitarian concerns, and she often combines the two in the pursuit of her unique vision incorporating the arts in the attainment of human and health rights.

INSPIRATION: Caprice is inspired by writers like Oliver Sacks, Richard Selzer and Abraham Verghese who wrote of medicine.

ASPIRATION: Caprice hopes to focus her work in the health arena on marginalized and at-risk communities including inner city areas and American Indian reservations. She plans to continue writing as a novelist and playwright.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE: Caprice volunteered extensively at Fellowship Place, a New Haven center for the mentally ill. She served as a mentor with New Haven adolescents, worked with America Reads in the New Haven public schools, served as a college advisor for New York inner city high schoolers with the Children's Aid Society, and volunteered on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She has also advocated extensively abroad, implementing an art therapy program for survivors of domestic violence in Mexico; creating an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign with a small selected group of other Yale students in Swaziland; and advocating for the health rights of the Dalit ("Untouchable") caste in the Maharashtra district of southern India.

ACCOLADES: Caprice is the recipient of the Fannie Rothberg Scholarship, awarded to one Yale undergraduate female student every four years. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 2004 $10,000 Bertelsmann World of Expression Scholarship; Gold Key in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards; and two 1st Place recognitions in the national ACT-SO Olympics of the Mind. She is the recipient of the Richter Fellowship for study abroad. In 2008 she was chosen to serve on the prestigious board of judges of the Bertelsmann Writing Awards along with executives from Random House, the National Book Foundation, and the New Yorker. 

INTERESTING FACT: Caprice’s work has been published in Sounds of this House, an anthology from the National Book Foundation, and in the RBS anthology, I Have Risen. 

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