Kevin John Carroll

Kevin John Carroll grew up in the Castle Hill Houses in the South Bronx, an upbringing that would later provide the setting for many of the stories and memories in his writing. A self-described lifelong troublemaker, Carroll left school at a young age and worked a variety of jobs before eventually joining the New York City Department of Sanitation. His experiences gave him an intimate view of working-class New York and the people, neighborhoods, humor, and hardships that shaped his life.

For nearly three decades, Carroll struggled with heroin addiction, a period that took him through some of the most difficult chapters of his life in the South Bronx and Harlem. After years of addiction, arrests, and attempts to change course, he entered rehabilitation and began the long process of recovery. It was during a three-month rehabilitation program in the early 1990s that Carroll began putting his experiences on paper. What started as an exercise in reflection grew into a way of confronting his past with unusual candor, humor, and perspective.

Those writings eventually became I Still Can’t Fly: Confessions of a Lifelong Troublemaker, his memoir of growing up, addiction, survival, and recovery. Rather than separating the painful from the funny, Carroll writes about both, capturing the contradictions of a life shaped by hardship, poor decisions, resilience, and second chances. His story offers a deeply personal portrait of one man’s life while also preserving a piece of working-class New York history.