Michael John Carley is an author, school and business consultant, and former Executive Director in the autism, neurodiversity, mental health, disability, and DEI worlds. He received his B.A. from Hampshire College and his M.F.A. from Columbia University.
Between 2003 and 2013, as the Founder and first Executive Director of the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (GRASP), at the time the largest membership organization in the world that is comprised of adults on the autism spectrum, he spoke at over 100 conferences, hospitals, universities, and health care organizations. As the Executive Director of the Asperger Syndrome Training & Employment Partnership (ASTEP, now “Integrate”) from 2011-2014, he spoke at conferences focusing on Human Resources, Corporate Diversity & Inclusion, and he conducted numerous trainings and webinars for individual Fortune 1000 companies. From 2004-2016, he consulted for the New York City Public Schools, and he now not only consults for school districts nationwide, he also now consults in higher education.
Currently he is the Facilitator of New York University’s Connections Program for Global Students on the Autism Spectrum. Among his many other posts, he serves closely as:
• The Editor-in-Chief of Neurodiversity Press
• The Neurodiversity and Leadership Advisor for The League School for Autism
• The Board Advisor for EPIC Players (disability theatre company)
• The Special Advisor for Neurodiversity to The Ed Factory
• A Core Faculty member of LEND (Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities) at Stonybrook University
• The neurodiversity representative of the Best Practices Working Group at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens
• A member of the Leadership Committee for the ALICE (United Way) Initiative on Disabilities
• A Reviewer for JADD, the Journal of Autism and other Developmental Disorders.
He has frequently appeared in the media, most notably in the New York Times, Washington Post, NY Newsday, the London Times, HuffPost Live, NEWSWEEK OnAir, ABCNews, BBC News, FOX News Network, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Psychology Today, Exceptional Parent Magazine, and on radio with Terry Gross’ Fresh Air and The Infinite Mind. NPR News also aired a 12-minute story in June of 2006 that featured him and GRASP. Carley was also featured in the documentaries, On the Spectrum, and Off the Rails.
In 2012, he was one of two people on the spectrum to address the United States Congress in their first-ever hearings on autism. He has addressed the United Nations, taken part in Dr. Amy Laurents’ TED talk, and his articles have been published in over a dozen publications—magazines such as Autism Spectrum News, Autism Spectrum Quarterly, and Autism/Asperger Digest; the Organization for Autism Research; and he also had a regular column called Autism Without Fear that existed for four years and more than 30 articles in the Huffington Post. He also regularly writes for Sinkhole, Exceptional Parent Magazine, and the blog of Neurodiversity Press.
His first book, Asperger’s From the Inside Out: A Supportive and Practical Guide for Anyone with Asperger’s Syndrome, was released in April, 2008 by Penguin/Perigee. His second book, Unemployed on the Autism Spectrum, was released in early 2016 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. His latest book is The Book of Happy, Positive, and Confident Sex for Adults on the Autism Spectrum…and Beyond! and was the inaugural publication of Neurodiversity Press in 2021. All three continue to receive rave reviews.
As a peer mentor, he currently works with individuals at regularly scheduled times.
He was the inaugural FAR Fund Fellow in 2003, and he has since received NYFAC’s Ben Kramer Award (2008), the BCID Award for Service (2009), Columbia University’s Herbert M. Cohen Lecture (2011), and Eden II’s Peter McGowan & John Potterfield Achievement Award (2011). From 2014-2021 he sat on the Board of Directors of NEXT for Autism (the non-profit behind HBO’s Night of Too Many Stars).
Until 2001, Mr. Carley was the United Nations Representative of Veterans for Peace, Inc. In that time, he was known primarily for his work in Bosnia, and in Iraq as the Project Director of the internationally acclaimed Iraq Water Project. Prior to 2001, he was also a playwright who enjoyed 15 productions and 10 readings of his plays in New York.
Along with his (then) 4-year old son, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in November of 2000. Reevaluated in 2014 under DSM-5, he was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
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When Carley was two years old, his father, a Marine Corps helicopter pilot, was killed in Vietnam. His mother and he had already moved back to her hometown of Providence, RI to live with her parents so that she could finish school while her husband was away, and so after his father’s passing, they both stayed.
For the next three years, he spent afternoons with his grandmother, who (too old for climbing trees) played cards with him every day. As his grandmother had once made significant money playing when she was much younger, Carley was taught to read body signals, and not to give away a great hand, lest he perhaps lose his allowance. Without knowing it he was being taught what we know today as “non-verbal communication.” His grandmother had made the decision to resuscitate this part of her after Carley had tested grades ahead of his peers in math.
His mother became a schoolteacher and the two moved into an apartment when Carley was 5. And as his mother taught at Providence’s school for privileged girls, Carley received free tuition to attend Providence’s school for privileged boys. It was a disaster that lasted 9 years due not only to undiagnosed Asperger’s or the legacy of his father’s war, but also the economic disparity between he and his peers. Carley struggled socially, angered teachers, and barely passed each succeeding grade.
In middle school, he became a sort of mascot for some of Providence’s most notorious juvenile delinquents. They saw Carley as rejected by those that rejected them, and took him under his wing. While Carley never participated in anything he felt uncomfortable with, he was grateful for the companionship, and even more grateful for the adventures that he was granted thanks to the reckless behavior of his new friends. Carley, it seemed, was doing everything at a far younger age than any of his peers, and it made him feel lucky.
Also now a respected guitar player, Carley was starting to play in clubs—sometimes late at night—in many (what he calls “really bad garage”) bands. This too was a great help to his social confidence. But now with long hair, a guitar, disreputable companions, and eccentric mannerisms that no one around him understood, he accrued a reputation at the private as a drug user (Carley did start drinking at a young age, however). The only thing the school seemed to like about him was his pitching arm.
However, Carley always worked. Starting at age 11 he was getting up at 4 a.m. every day to do an hour-long paper route that earned him constant praise from his supervisor, and starting at age 15 he had an after-school job polishing jewelry until 6 p.m. (In later college years he would work as a pot washer and prep cook, and in graduate school as a music librarian.)
At the beginning of 10th grade, Carley switched to an alternative school, School One. Known as “the druggie school” to most, School One had no sports, yearbooks, proms, or grades. It existed with just under 100 students in a converted bowling alley in a downtown Providence neighborhood known for heavy prostitution and bars that were mob-run. Carley welcomed the change. His grades suddenly soared, and he switched groups of friends to a vastly different collection of peers that were artists, that were gay, or that were theatre people, but that still displayed the romanticized reckless behavior of his prior friends.
Carley graduated in 1983, the same year that his mother remarried, and he then went to Hampshire College where he graduated after only three years. There, he enjoyed a heightened social status that he had never before experienced; all because people thought he was talented.
After graduation, Carley went to Eastern Europe. A budding Bertolt Brecht scholar, Carley had received permission from the East German government to do some work in the Brecht Archives in East Berlin. But seizing the opportunity, he spent months, not weeks behind the iron curtain, going also to Poland (during the post-Solidarnosc days), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other parts of East Germany. Now addicted to adventures, Carley had realized that, in travel, no one thought he was weird. Any behavioral differences were chalked up to the simple fact that Carley was a foreigner, and so travel became a chance for a clean slate, and an opportunity to experiment with different social behaviors, for there would be no cost if he failed. In travel, as Carley quickly discovered, you were soon to move onto the next town. One would never see those sources of embarrassment again, so what was the cost of social failure?
Only one day after returning from Europe, he drove down to New York City to start a partial scholarship he’d received for graduate school at Columbia University. Still destined to be the weird kid, his reputation wasn’t helped by having to live out of his car on Riverside Drive for the first week of school. But once his abilities and work ethic displayed themselves, his schoolmates and faculty welcomed him, and he was the first graduate playwright in his year to be awarded a student production.
He finished classes two years later, and was set to graduate in the following year of 1989. But first, his subsequent thesis centered on another adventure: Living out of his car for five months while he traveled around the U.S., working odd jobs to pay for food and gas. He’d wanted to accomplish something else for his thesis, something abroad. But his advisors were adamant that he have his adventure here. They knew that Carley had always felt ostracized, and they feared he would leave the U.S. soon after graduating. Knowing about his father, they believed Carley had to find a voice here.
In the next 4-5 months, Carley saw how right they were. Carley was living in the most eccentric country in the world and now he knew it. Through more drinking, more labor, listening to the stories of elders, and the occasional bar fight, Carley felt that he was finally living life the way he wanted to—according to the books he’d read, and not to “the provincial theoretical lectures of my elders,” and he felt accepted in his own country. He had always wanted to be someone who wasn’t afraid of anything, and this trip seemed to be convincing him that he was on the right path. So enamored of a life filled with heightened self-reliance, his mother had to coax him home. Already a month late for registering for his thesis year, he had toyed with “staying out there.”
He married an actress and fellow playwright in 1990, and pursued his theatre career, eventually totaling 15 productions, countless workshops, and lots of additional work as a sound designer, actor, and director. But after the Gulf War began in 1990 he also hooked up with an organization called Veterans for Peace (VFP) and began working for them on the side, traveling soon with them to Cuba, Bosnia, and elsewhere.
In 1991, he decided to reject his genetic, Irish-Catholic heritage, and quit drinking.
In 1996, his first son, C.C., was born. And in 1997 he became VFP’s United Nations NGO Representative.
In 2000 he began his largest endeavor, the Iraq Water Project. According to a 1998 UNICEF report, over 5,000 children were dying every month as a direct result of the economic sanctions being placed on Iraq. Waterborne diseases being the main culprit, VFP started this endeavor in theory, and then sent Carley to choose sites. Under hair-raising conditions, Carley eventually chose four water treatment facilities to be repaired in a suburb of the highest need area (Basra) called Abul Khaseeb. Under further dramatic circumstances, he returned one year later to lead a delegation of war vets (WW II, Korea, Viet Nam, and Gulf War) in a publicity gesture that also would allow him, as Project Director, to monitor the progress. In the end, the project brought clean water to 81,000 people at a cost of only $125,000. This economic and innovative breakthrough was in direct contrast to the strategies of larger agencies that were spending ten times the amount to accomplish similar goals, and that were incurring resentment, not thanks, from locals.
In between these Iraq trips, however, in late 2000—exactly a week apart from one another—he and his son were both diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. For Carley, this answered a lifetime of unexplained mysteries; and it put all of the negative experiences under the contextual umbrella of wiring, and not character.
In 2001 he was asked to take over a small adult Asperger support group In New York. He and his wife were in the process of an amicable divorce with shared custody, and the added free time allowed him to pursue more knowledge about this strange new word “Asperger’s.”
At the time, the monthly meetings had 6-8 people per in attendance, and less than 20 in circulation. But within two years the group was meeting three times a month, had 45 on average, and over 400 in circulation. The idea of a peer running the show had hit a positive nerve, and speaking engagements soon followed for Carley. An opportunity from the FAR Fund in 2003 led to the formation of GRASP.
GRASP quickly became the largest membership organization in the world for adults diagnosed anywhere along the autism spectrum, and currently has 28 chapters throughout North America, 8,000 full members, and another 11,000 followers scattered through various social media outlets.
From 2002 until 2008 (or when GRASP got too big for him to continue) he worked as a backup classical music host for New York Public Radio. And in 2004, he both began consulting for the New York City schools’ special education district, and wrote his first published article in the autism/Asperger world. In January, 2011 he became the Executive Director of the Asperger Syndrome Training & Employment Partnership (ASTEP), working with large companies to help train them to either better manage existing spectrum employees, or to increase their confidence in hiring new ones. And in March 2013, not wanting to ever flirt with “Founder’s Syndrome,” he left GRASP. With the new time on his hands, he looks forward to writing more, finally having the time to promote his books more, and either finding the next great passion within another organization or pursuing more independent work.
From 2014-2020 his family agreed to six years of living in Green Bay, Wisconsin, taking care of in-laws; a time wherein his autism, his New Yorkerness, and the fact that he doesn’t drink, were not well appreciated. But he is proud of those years for, despite getting his ass kicked, having taken on the state educational apparatus during the rise of Scott Walker and Donald Trump. And in 2020 they all moved back to the east where he felt instantly loved once again. But he also knows that those Wisconsin years were great for his family, and his writing became ten times more uncompromising.
In his spare time he plays American Primitive-style fingerpicking on a National dobro, he coached travel baseball (and now has coached at every age level) and before leaving NYC was the oldest player in a Brooklyn semi-pro baseball league.