Curtis’ latest book is another work of historical fiction for youngsters, Elijah of Buxton. It focuses on the community of former slaves from America that settled in Buxton, Ontario in the mid 19^th century. Eleven-year-old Elijah, the first baby born in Buxton, becomes a helper on the Underground Railroad and in the process learns why his neighbors take pride in their community’s role as a safe haven for fugitives from slavery.  

Karolyn Smardz Frost

Karolyn Smardz Frost is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2007 for her landmark volume I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: a Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad.  

This the first entirely original fugitive slave biography since the 19th century, and details the remarkable story of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, who fled Kentucky in 1831 and whose 1833 arrival in Canada sparked the establishment of Canada’s very first refugee policies. The product of more than 20 years of research that entailed travel to 13 American states plus extensive work in Canada, it is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux of New York and Thomas Allen Books of Toronto (February 2007).  

I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land has been critically acclaimed in both the US and Canada, and stands as a monument to the more than 35,000 men, women and children who traveled northwards in search of liberty in the years before the American Civil War.

As Executive Director of the Ontario Historical Society, Karolyn Smardz Frost currently administers the oldest provincial heritage organization. The OHS, through its more than 360 affiliated and member societies, collectively represents more than 50,000 people in Ontario. Karolyn holds a BA in archaeology, a master’s in Classical Studies and a PhD from the University of Waterloo in History (Race, Slavery and Imperialism). At Waterloo she studied under Dr. James St. George Walker, who wrote The Black Loyalists: the Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (1976, 1992) and Race, Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (1999) as well as numerous articles and an invaluable little book entitled A history of Blacks in Canada: a study guide for teachers and students (1980).  

Anna-Lisa Cox

Anna-Lisa Cox, is an active historian, writer, and lecturer on the history of race relations in the nineteenth-century Midwest. She received her M.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and her Ph.D. in American history from the University of Illinois. Dr. Cox has been the recipient of numerous awards for her research, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Scholars Award, the Gilder Lehrman Foundation Fellowship, and the Pew Younger Scholars Fellowship. She is the author of A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith, published by Little, Brown and winner of a Michigan Notable Book award. Dr. Cox is currently at work on her next book entitled, Founding Freedom -- a history of the free blacks who moved from the South to the Midwestern frontier before the Civil War. While she currently resides in New York City, next year Anna-Lisa will be continuing work on her book as an honorary fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research.  

Allen Guelzo

Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He holds the MA and PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania. His biography, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President  won the Lincoln Prize in 2000, as did his Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, in 2005. His most recent work is Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (2008). He has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books and Books and Culture, and has been featured as a “Star Professor” by The Teaching Company. He lives in Paoli and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Debra.