Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost

Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost is an archaeologist, historian and award-winning author specializing in African Canadian/African American transnationalism. Her 2007 biography of Kentucky freedom seekers Lucie (Ruthie) and Thornton Blackburn, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, was the first book on African Canadian history to win the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. She is co-author of The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! (2002) and co-editor of The Archaeology Education Handbook: Sharing the Past with Kids (2000), Ontario’s African-Canadian Past (2008),  and the Canada-US collaborative volume, A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (2016). Karolyn’s most recent book, Steal Away Home (2017), tells the story of fifteen-year-old Cecelia Jane Reynolds who made her dramatic escape from Louisville slave owners via Niagara Falls.