Speakers

Juanita Peters is a multi-award-winning storyteller, writer and director of documentaries including Hannah’s Story, I Made A Vow and Africville Can’t Stop Now and television series including Studio Black on CBC Television. In 2020, she is slated to direct the feature film drama, Rebirth 8:37 , about two teenagers from vastly different backgrounds who become forever linked in a split second with the four pound trigger pull of a snub nosed 38.

Peters served as a journalist and news anchor for more than 15 years in the Maritimes and hosted 4 seasons of CBC’s documentary series Doc Side. As a playwright she has given us: The San Family (2013),  about a black family who arrives in a segregated sanitorium 1943. Their music is the elixir that soothes souls and brings down barriers; The Mother Club, (2014), about rural black midwives who stop at nothing to save lives; unless you harm their own; I M Possible (2015), living the American dream is real, even for rural black Nova Scotian men. But first a black man has to believe in the impossible; The Green Book (2016),  there’s a reason why this is the road not taken by coloureds. Before hitting the open road, “you better check your Green Book.”

Juanita Peters the actor has appeared in more than 30 films and television series  including Sex & Violence, Forgive Me, Splinters, Hobo With a Shotgun, Cloudburst and including the Emmy Nominated Homeless to Harvard.  In recent years she has worked for the Council on African Canadian Education (Communications), and as Knowledge Lead for The Nova Scotia Restorative Inquiry for The Home For Colored Children.  Currently she holds the position of Executive Director of the Africville Museum. She is an alumna of the WIDC – Banff program.

Bhreagh MacNeil is a Canadian actress.She is most noted for her performance in the 2016 film Werewolf, for which she garnered a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Actress at the 5th Canadian Screen Awards. She also won the award for Best Actress in a Canadian Film at the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards 2016, and at the 2016 Atlantic Film Festival.

Originally from Big Pond, Nova Scotia, she studied theatre at Memorial University of Newfoundland's Grenfell Campus. Bhreagh is the star of Queen of the Andes.

Brian Bartlett grew up in New Brunswick, lived for 15 years in Montreal, and has now been a Halifax resident for more than three decades. His publications include 7 collections and 8 chapbooks of poetry, 3 books of nature writing, and a compilation of his prose on poetry. Brian's poetry had been honoured with the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry, and two Malahat Review Long Poem Prizes. He taught Creative Writing and various fields of literature at Saint Mary's University for many years before retirement in 2018. Brian has enjoyed about ten residencies at the Elizabeth Bishop house in Great Village; edited the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia for a decade; and has given presentations on her writing at conferences in Wolfville, Nova Scotia; Sheffield, England; and Ouro Preto, Brazil.