Full Biography
Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost is an archaeologist, historian and award-winning author. In 1985, she and her team at the Toronto school board’s Archaeological Resource Centre uncovered the first Underground Railroad site in Canada. With a doctorate in History specializing in Race, Slavery and Imperialism from the University of Waterloo, Karolyn is a scholar of North American Black transnationalism.
She is the author or co-editor of five acclaimed volumes on African Canadian history. Her biography of freedom seekers Lucie and Thornton Blackburn, I've Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad (2007) won the Governor General's Literary Award and was launched at the Canada Institute of the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. In 2017, her lively account of the experiences of fifteen-year-old Cecelia Jane Reynolds who fled slavery by way of Niagara Falls, Steal Away Home, won the Speaker’s Award for the Legislative Assembly of Ontario; the J.J. Talman Award as the best book on Ontario history in three years; and was a finalist for the Atlantic Book Award.
Now living in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Karolyn is an adjunct professor at Acadia and Dalhousie Universities, an Affiliated Research Scholar at the University of Buffalo Archaeology Lab, and has just begun a new position as Senior Research Fellow for the A Black People’s History of Canada project at Dalhousie University.
