Odette Barr and her partner, YoAnne Beauchamp, spent nearly ten years completely immersed in Inuit culture in the decade prior to the official birth of Nunavut Territory. This is the account of their experiences as teachers and community members in Pangnirtung, Hall Beach, and Grise Fiord. Odette and YoAnne learned quickly that to be successful northern teachers, you must enter into the lives of your students and their rich culture in meaningful and significant ways.

The best memoirs are maps of the heart and mind, and Marjorie Simmins invites you to explore the map of your own life. Here are the probing questions and dynamic writing ideas, coupled with inspirational interviews with best-selling memoirists, to light your own imagination afire. This book is for any reader or writer who is fascinated by the renegade memoir form—personal life stories that demand to be read, refuse to be forgotten.

Allan Cooper's latest poetry collection includes some of his most personal poems, including revelations to him after the death of his mother and sharply etched emotional memories of childhood and grandparents.

Readers return to Allan Cooper's poems to be reminded of the quiet power of nature and how it can shape our lives and provide sustenance, vision, and even salvation when necessary. Here are poems to be read slowly and cherished.

The latest short story collection by master storyteller Wayne Curtis. Here are illuminating stories of love, heartbreak, daydreams, and expectations – fulfilled and unfulfilled. Curtis charts the lives of small-town boys and girls, men and women who struggle with the challenges and limitations of poverty, isolation, and a kind of discrimination rarely documented in fiction.

Every patient tells a story. Drawing on a forty-year medical career, Dr. Larry Kramer has written about some of the people he has met along the way. The stories chronicle love and loss, tragedy and comedy, and empathetically observe patients who live and die, some with courage and some with fear. These accounts frame the story of one physician's life and how it was shaped, changed, and guided by those he encountered every day.

Many knew Dr. Savage as their physician. Others speak about his time as mayor of Dartmouth. Yet most remember him as Nova Scotia's twenty-third premier. From tackling the health and education systems to making turn-the-province-on-its head decisions while premier, John was determined to change the way things were done. "Against the Grain" chronicles how he fought the status quo with unwavering conviction to leave a lasting legacy that would change the province of Nova Scotia forever.

"Sculpting Towards the Light" is an intimate and insightful story of a sculptor and his work. It follows the paths of imagination and activity which gave birth to a very unique work of art. The paths are diverse and unexpected, twisting into personal history, racing forward into the future, and then resting in the euphoric moments when the mind and its thoughts no longer exist and the carving occurs as if of its own accord.

This is the story of the leading roles some Nova Scotians played in the North American door-to-door sales profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "The Peddlers" takes you on a door-to-door tour of the origins of household brands like Minard’s and Sloan’s Liniment, and also chronicles a century-old Hants County murder case involving two young peddlers — one the victim, the other the perpetrator.

Cook offers contemplative glances and lingering views on everyday life, as if observed through a window on the weather, landscape, and appearance or disappearance of things that matter. These observations act as mirrors that reflect the self and allow the merging of inner and outer worlds. The poet's rewards are discoveries of self and other in the magic visions and sounds that arise in combinations of words, like bits of winter ice reflecting prisms of light, life, and vision.

"Colours in Winter" is a whimsical children's picture book. The child, with her two bird friends, wishes that the giant snowflakes were coloured. Everything is too white. She thinks of green frogs in the spring, enormous red strawberries in the summer, and yellow and brown leaves in the autumn. Her desire becomes true and the snowflakes are suddenly all different colours. When everything turns back to white, she makes a wonderful discovery: there is colour everywhere in the winter.

Janice Landry asks the very tough question, "What are you the most grateful for?" to fifteen inspiring Canadians from five provinces and two esteemed guests from the United States. Let's face it: it's easy to be grateful when things are running smoothly. The people in "Silver Linings" have discovered that gifts may actually emerge from life's toughest challenges.

From Andrea Miller — an editor and staff writer at Lion's Roar, the leading Buddhist magazine in the English-speaking world — comes a diverse and timeless collection of essays, articles, and interviews. Miller, whose writing is by turns earnest and irreverent, unadorned and lyrical, talks to Buddhist teachers, thinkers, writers, and celebrities about the things that matter most and she frames their wisdom with her own lived experience.

December 1954: the old city in winter wears its two hundred years of grime and vice without any shame. On the street, hard-drinking Halifax police detective Ray Vargas has an unfailing habit for finding trouble, and when a man is found shot to death in the back of a Chevy truck, Vargas finds more trouble than he can handle — the murdered man is his oldest friend and the husband of his lover. Vargas sets off to find a killer in a city that doesn't much want a killer to be found.

Linda and Michael wrote "In Two Voices" together: it is the intimate account of Linda’s surgery with Michael as her surgeon. The story builds a piece at a time as Linda and Michael tell each other their experience and then respond to one another’s writing. As the relationship shifts from one of patient and surgeon to one of Linda and Michael as colleagues and friends, they encounter surprises as their trust and mutual understanding develop.

Set in contemporary times, a young Mi’kmaw drum singer and a Euro-Nova Scotian biologist meet at dusk each day to count a population of endangered Chimney Swifts (kaktukopnji’jk). They quickly struggle with their differing views of the world. Through humour and story, the characters must come to terms with their own gifts and challenges as they dedicate efforts to the birds. Each "count night" reveals a deeper complexity of connection to land and history on a personal level.

Poetry can address our most intimate, frightened, hopeful selves. Langille found this to be true as she introduced poems to men and women in prison and gave writing assignments based on the discussions these poems inspired. Over and over participants shared private moments of self-awareness. The support they gave each other and the stories they told were profound. This book confirms that creative expression has a central place in the process of rehabilitation.

Trapped by her own insecurities, Kahlua cannot relate to the person in the mirror. She believes that if she doesn't acknowledge her thick hair, big lips, and dark skin maybe, just maybe, she'll be able to blend in. Hiding in the back of the class, she writes, passionately expressing and releasing emotions about identity, home, community, culture, and forgiveness. All Kahlua wants is freedom, whatever that really means.

This is a highly charged first collection of spoken word poetry based on the lives of inner city youth. It's deep, raw, uncut, and unflinching in telling their stories. Each poem will take you into the inner life of young people trying to survive in a hostile world. Here are poems created to break barriers, stigmas, and stereotypes that keep us all stuck in darkness, poems to open hearts and minds.

From working in the steel plant and as a sleeping car porter to being awarded the Order of Canada and appointed to the Senate of Canada, Calvin Ruck worked diligently to ensure that his children, and his children’s children, wouldn’t have to go through the same things he went through. His efforts were the beginning of a major movement for Black employment in the Nova Scotian community. Through his tireless efforts and dedication, he initiated a significant social transformation in Nova Scotia.

These poems range from a personal evocation of Black Nova Scotian history to an intense, intimate response to world events in the last thirty years. All are “fugitive poems” evolving from 1979 to 1991.

This is a compelling novel set in Prohibition-era Montreal when alcohol, drugs and jazz music ruled “Sin City.” Taylor Williams is a young black musician struggling to find fame in the Montreal Harlem District amid gangsters, racism and bootleggers. As a young boy, Taylor escaped a terrifying ordeal that haunts him as he pursues his dream of becoming a famous jazz musician.

During his 50 years in Nova Scotia, Gus Wedderburn fought social injustice in his home province. A driving force for many years in the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, he was a founder of the Black Educators Association, the Black United Front, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, and the Black Cultural Centre. Gus was a vocal crusader for the rights of the disadvantaged at a time when discrimination in education, employment and housing was the status quo.

In their own words, the twenty authors create a conversation with the reader about the Black social workers in Canada who have struggled to bring change not for themselves, but for their communities. Included are stories of foster care, adoption, immigration, disability, poverty and how social workers deal with the everyday racism in education and in their practice. These writers invite readers to think critically about their experiences, their journeys and the lessons learned along the way.

This is Abena Beloved Green's debut book of poetry. Her poems address cultural, social, and environmental issues, relationships, and reflect on everyday life as a small-town raised, semi-nomadic, first-generation Canadian. Here are poems about holding on and letting go—of ideas, opinions, beliefs, people, places, and things.

Maxine Tynes's third book addresses children and adults with heartfelt concerns and her exhilarating insight into the workings of the world. In 1988, Maxine was named the Milton Acorn People's Poet of Canada for her lively and intense writing.

After Africville was bulldozed in the 1960s under the guise of “urban renewal,” Eddie Carvery returned to the site of his former hometown and pitched a tent in protest. Forty years, three families, seven heart attacks and numerous attempts on his life later, he remains living on the land where he was born. He’s been shot at, had his residence set on fire and been run off his land countless times. He’s rebuilt himself and never given up his dream of Africville.

George Dixon was the finest boxer of his generation and arguably among the finest boxers ever. His accomplishments in the ring were extraordinary: the first Black boxing champion, the first Canadian boxing champion, the first boxing champion of multiple weight classes, and the first boxing champion to lose to regain his title. He defended his title more than any other champion - then or since - and he reportedly fought in an unprecedented 800 bouts.

Sam Langford was so good that many boxers refused to fight him, so good that he took bouts with bigger men just to get a match, so good that he once fought the greatest boxer of his age, Jack Johnson, who was forty pounds heavier and a good foot taller—and still went the distance. From his first bout in 1902 until his last a quarter century later, he battled boxing’s colour barrier that kept him from being world champion in three different weight classes.

This book tells the extraordinary story of how one of Bob Marley's greatest songs was born in Nova Scotia. It opens with Marley's live acoustic performance of Redemption Song at the end of his life, and reveals that the core lyric comes from a speech Marcus Garvey delivered in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1937. The author explores why Marley so revered Garvey, and, in doing so, looks at the roots of Rastafarianism and ideas about race.