Anita Best C.M. is a teacher, broadcaster, recording artist, and well-known singer from Newfoundland. Best has spent a lifetime exploring, cataloguing and celebrating the rural Newfoundland lifestyle and culture. In the process she has become one of the province’s most well-known traditional singers.
Terry Bishop Stirling is a retired professor of History and former Chair of the History Department at Memorial University. She has written numerous articles and presented papers on Newfoundland social and political history, with emphasis on health and welfare policy, women’s history, and volunteerism. She is an active public historian and has served on the executive of the NL Historical Society for over thirty years, including a term as President.
Hayward C. Blake was born in Pushthrough, a NL community that was resettled in 1969. He holds education degrees from Memorial University and the University of Toronto. He has served as an educator in rural NL and as an administrator in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University. Hayward’s leadership and commitment to education have been recognized with a Reader’s Digest Leadership Award and by being named the Canadian Principal of the Year by the Canadian Association of Principals. Hayward is an active volunteer in his community, continuing his lifelong commitment to service and education.
Raymond B. Blake (PhD FRSC) is professor of history at the University of Regina and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has written and edited more than 20 books on Canadian and Newfoundland history, focusing on nationalism, citizenship, and identity as well as 20th century politics. His most recent book, Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity, was awarded the 2025 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing from the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
Sonja Boon is a writer, researcher, flutist, and teacher. The author, co-author, or editor of seven books, most recently Dear Mr. Smallwood: Confederation in the words of those who lived it (2025), Sonja is also a mentor in the MFA (creative nonfiction) program at the University of King’s College.
Heidi Coombs (she/her) is an education specialist with the Faculty of Medicine and an independent historian. She has a PhD in history specializing in nursing with the Grenfell Mission and has numerous publications based on her research. She is active in the heritage and arts communities, serving as a longtime board member and past president of the NL Historical Society. In the folk arts community, she recently helped establish I’s Not the B’y, a traditional session for women and gender-diverse musicians, with the NL Folk Arts Society.
Mary Dalton has published six poetry volumes, among them Merrybegot, Red Ledger, Hooking, and Interrobang, and as a prose miscellany, Edge. Her Pratt Lecture, The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry, was released by Breakwater in 2022. Dalton served as Poet Laureate of St. John’s, 2019-2023. Her forthcoming anthology, Best Canadian Poetry, is being launched at the Ship Pub on November 30.
Margot I. Duley is Professor Emerita of History and Women’s Studies, Eastern Michigan University, and Dean Emerita, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Springfield. She has written extensively about the Newfoundland women’s suffrage movement and related topics and is the editor and chief contributor to the Cross Cultural Study of Women, an interdisciplinary survey. Her most recent book is From Silence to Suffrage: Women’s Path to Citizenship in Newfoundland, 1803-1949 (Boulder Books, 2025). Dr. Duley is also a board member with the NL Historical Society and PerSIStence Theatre.
Meret Ebsary (she/her), iBA, MSc, and 2025 Rhodes Scholar, is reading for a Master’s in Comparative and International Education at the University of Oxford. Building on her research into women’s suffrage and eugenics in Newfoundland, her work examines how history curricula shape political understanding and national identity.
Tracy Evans-Rice is an Inuk from Makkovik, Nunatsiavut. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Carleton University and has worked with Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the Nunatsiavut Government. While there, she planned an Inuit Women’s Conference in Nain, hosted Lunch ‘n Learns, held Take Back the Night marches, and held workshops around Violence Prevention, Women in Leadership, and Women’s well-being. She is now a Senior Policy Analyst with Nunatsiavut Affairs and a Master’s student in Arctic and Subarctic Futures at the Labrador Campus, Memorial University.
Kristina Fagan Bidwell is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Storytelling and Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She grew up in St. John’s and is a member of NunatuKavut Community Council. She currently leads a collaborative project that seeks to amplify urban Indigenous voices from St. John’s and Saskatoon.
Noreen Golfman is happily retired after almost 40 years from Memorial University, where she worked as a professor and senior administrator. Memorial conferred an Honorary Doctorate on her this year. Life in retirement has allowed her to continue engaging with the arts community in various ways, while serving on the advisory board of the not-for-profit Studiosity. She is now a regular podcaster for them on higher ed issues.
Vicki S. Hallett (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Memorial University. Her research interests include the co-constitution of place and identity through life narratives, archival serendipity, and historical silences. She is Vice-President of the NL Historical Society and in 2024, served as interim Academic Editor at Memorial University Press.
Leahdawn Helena (she/they/nekm) is an award-winning playwright of Mi’kmaq and mixed Settler ancestry from the west coast of Newfoundland, now living in St John’s. Their play, Stolen Sisters, won the Playwrights Guild of Canada John Palmer Award in 2024, and is available from Breakwater Books.
Erica (Samms) Hurley (MD) is a Mi’kmaw Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at Grenfell Campus, cross-appointed to Interdisciplinary Humanities. A nurse educator, her research centers Indigenous health—grounded in community, relationality, and Mi’kmaw knowledge. Drawing from her ancestors’ traditional healing knowledge, Erica champions decolonizing approaches within health education and Indigenous-led, community-rooted research.
Linda Kealey is Professor Emerita at the University of New Brunswick. Before moving to UNB, she was a member of the History Department at Memorial University, 1980-2002, and became involved in creating the Women’s Studies Programme. Select publications include Pursuing Equality: Historical Perspectives on Women in Newfoundland and Labrador (1993) and “Outport ‘Girls in Service’: Newfoundland in the 1920s and 1930s” in Acadiensis (2014). Her article “From Dreams of Equality to One Hundred Years of Struggle: Radical Women’s Biographies in the History of Canadian Politics” appeared in Rethinking Feminist History and Theory; Essays on Gender, Class and Labour (2025).
Willeen Keough is a retired Professor of History, Simon Fraser University. She has published extensively on gender, ethnicity, immigration, oral history, and communal memory in Newfoundland in the18th–20th centuries. Her award-winning monograph, The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon, 1750-1860, is available through Columbia University Press.
Julia Laite is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. She publishes widely in gender and women’s history, the history of migration and labour, and historical methodology. Her new book project will tell the story of the Beothuk woman Shanawdithit, the dilletante ethnographer William Eppes Cormack, and her own Newfoundland ancestors.
Robin McGrath is a writer, journalist, and former academic specializing in Inuit culture and literature. She is the author of 26 books, the most recent of which is Poems on the Long Finger.
Bonnie Morgan (MLIS/LLB, PhD) is a librarian and award-winning historian. She is the author of Ordinary Saints: Women, Work and Faith in Newfoundland (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019) and Out on the Trail (Running the Goat Books and Broadsides, 2025). Bonnie works as Public Services Librarian at Memorial University’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies.
Trudy Morgan-Cole has written seven Newfoundland historical novels, all focusing on women’s experiences, as well as the play The Mirror, about pioneering Newfoundland suffragist Armine Nutting Gosling. Trudy is a retired educator living in St. John’s and is currently working on a novel set in Ferryland in the mid-seventeenth century.
Social Worker Peg Norman helped to found and then manage Henry Morgentaler’s clinic in St. John’s. A cinematographer, she filmed and appears in the award-winning My Left Breast, which documents her partner, Gerry Rogers’ journey with breast cancer. Together, they own the “Bees Knees” and the “Travel Bug,” community-minded Water Street businesses.
Andrea O’Brien has a BA focusing on folklore, history, NL Studies, and English, a BEd, and a Masters in Folklore. She serves as Heritage NL’s Register of Historic Places, Municipal Outreach Officer, Heritage Places Poster Contest coordinator, Historic Commemorations Program coordinator, and web manager. Andrea has worked 8 seasons at the Colony of Avalon in Ferryland and with the Folklore and Language Archives. She is also a founding board member of the Mummers Festival.
Ellen Power’s performances are rooted in the musical heritage of her family: well-known singers, storytellers and fishermen from Placentia Bay. She has performed for nearly 25 years at festivals across Newfoundland. Sharing songs passed down through generations of Newfoundlanders before her, Ellen uses her voice to keep the old traditions alive.
Andrea Procter is an anthropologist with over 20 years of experience in working with Indigenous communities in Labrador and an Adjunct Professor at Memorial University. Her book, A Long Journey: Residential Schools in Labrador and Newfoundland (2020) won the 2021 Atlantic Canada Book Award for Scholarly Writing, the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Prize (Atlantic), and the NL Book Prize for Non-Fiction. She coordinated the Daughters of Mikak: Celebrating Inuit Women’s Leadership project for the Tradition and Transition among the Labrador Inuit SSHRC Partnership.
Rebecca Ralph is a historian and Manager of Legislation with the Department of Education, Government of NL. She has a PhD from the University of Calgary. Her SSHRC-funded research examined denominational pluralism in NL, which led to the denominational school system in the 19th and early 20th century. Dr. Ralph is currently President of the NL Historical Society.
International award-winning filmmaker Gerry Rogers (she/her) loves, loves, loves making films. Based on the feminist activism she learned from so many fabulous feminists in Newfoundland in the 1980s and then at Studio D in Montreal she then went on to become the first out lesbian/gay elected to the NL House of Assembly in 2011. After serving 8 years she’s back at making films and other trouble.
Rhea Rollmann (she/her) is an award-winning journalist, writer and author of A Queer History of Newfoundland. Among other distinctions her work has garnered three Atlantic Journalism Awards and the Andrea Walker Memorial Prize for Feminist Health Journalism. In 2024 she was short-listed for the NL Human Rights Award.
Julia Stryker is the former Pratt Postdoc in NL Military, Naval, and Maritime History and current adjunct professor for Memorial University. She received her PhD in History at the University of Texas at Austin for her research into women’s labour at sea in the nineteenth-century British empire. She is working with the Lloyd’s Heritage Foundation and the Marine Institute to hold symposia on the history and current status of women in maritime industries, to develop resources promoting retention and recruitment as part of the Seafaring Women Aboard and Ashore Network (SWAAAN).
Meaghan Walker was the inaugural 2021-2023 Ewart A. Pratt Postdoc of Naval, Military, and Maritime History at Memorial University and works closely with the Maritime History Archive. She studies maritime menswear in the British Empire (1660-1920). Her work has explored the clothing of merchant seafarers, Royal Navy sailors and marines, and now NL fishers largely in the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the adoption of ready-made or “slop” clothing by maritime workers. Dr. Walker received her doctorate from the University of Alberta in 2020 and her BA (Hons) and MA at Memorial University.
Agnes Walsh is a Placentia-born poet and playwright whose work embraces the oral histories and everyday experiences of the Cape Shore. She was founder/artistic director of the Tramore Theatre Company and inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of St. John’s. Her award-winning work has been published in four collections of poetry and a collection of plays.