Karolyn Smardz Frost

Karolyn Smardz Frost is an award-winning Canadian historian, archaeologist, and author whose scholarship centers on African American and African Canadian history, the Underground Railroad, and Black freedom movements in the nineteenth century. She holds a PhD in history and has spent decades conducting archival research on both sides of the Canada-United States border. Frost is the author of the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning biography I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land, which traces the lives of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, two freedom seekers who escaped slavery in Kentucky and built new lives in Toronto. Her work has been recognized with numerous academic and public history honors, and she is widely regarded as one of the foremost authorities on the transnational dimensions of American abolitionism and Black settlement in Upper Canada.