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Susan Musgrave was born on March 12, 1951 in Santa Cruz, California. She has lived in Hawaii, Ireland, England and Columbia and presently resides in Sidney, British Columbia. She is married to Stephen Reid whose fonds is also at McMaster. She has published novels, children's books, collections of essays and poetry. Her published works include Entrance of the Celebrant (1972), Selected Strawberries and Other Poems (1977), The Charcoal Burners (1980), The Dancing Chicken (1987), Great Musgrave (1989) Forcing the Narcissus (1994), The Situation in Which We Are Both Amateurs (1997), Things That Keep and Do Not Change (1999) and Cargo of Orchids (2000) and Origami Dove (2011), A Taste of Haida Gwaii (2016), More Blueberries (2019) (Chldren’s book) and Kiss Tickle Cuddle Hug (2010) (Children’s book).

Judith Robinson was born in Toronto, Ont. on Victoria Street on April 6, 1899. She was the daughter of Jessie and John Robinson Robinson (nicknamed “Black Jack Robinson”), who was the editor of the Toronto Telegram until his death in 1929. She attended Toronto Model School until age 12, when she contracted a childhood illness which stopped her schooling. Self-taught in journalism and literature, she also developed an interest in architecture.

Known as ‘Brad’ to her friends, Robinson became a reporter at the Toronto Globe in 1929. Under Globe President George McCullagh, she wrote a Page One feature column daily beginning in 1936. She resigned in 1940 over a political disagreement with the Globe’s coverage of World War II. With her brother John and Oakley Dalgleish, she clandestinely printed advertisements under the name “Canada Calling,” criticizing Mackenzie King government’s slow response to the war effort. In May 1941, she and Dalgleish founded NEWS, a national weekly newspaper whose editorial office was her home at 63 Wellesley St. NEWS closed in 1946. During the war she was also was active in the Women’s Emergency Committee which petitioned the Canadian government to close the Christie Street Veteran’s Hospital in Toronto. Those efforts helped result in the opening of Sunnybrook Military Hospital in 1946. Beginning in 1953, she wrote a daily column for the Toronto Telegram until her death on December 17, 1961.

Robinson authored three non-fiction books: Tom Cullen of Baltimore (1949), As We Came By (1951), and This Is On the House (1957). She edited John Farthing’s political treatise, Freedom Wears a Crown, and helped publish the medical memoir Days of Living: The Journal of Martin Roher, for which she wrote the introduction.

Ruthven Colquhoun McNairn served in the Second World War with the Algonquin Regiment. Born in Toronto on 24 August 1914, to William Harvey McNairn, a professor at McMaster University and Hester (Wilson) McNairn. He was the third of four brothers, with Robert and Norman proceeding him, and Ian following. The family relocated to Hamilton in 1930 when the University did.

In February 1933, after finishing high school, McNairn hitchhiked to travel to California and travelling around before being jailed on a charge of vagrancy. His father bailed him out and McNairn made his way home by June.

He began his studies at McMaster University, beginning in Mathematics and Physics, and then transferring to General Arts. He enjoyed being part of the Dramatic Society and appeared in a number of plays. He also was part of the literary society. He graduated in 1938, and did some more travelling before returning to Hamilton.

On 1 November 1940, he began military training with McMaster’s COTC and part time militia with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He completed his training in 1941 and hoped to join the Navy, which his younger brother also hoped to join. With no offers forthcoming, he formally enlisted 11 May 1942, and was sent for training at Gordon Head, BC. He would join the Algonquin Regiment in 1943 and shipped to Europe in early summer.

He was part of the operation to attempt to closed the ‘Falaise Gap’ and would then carry on towards Belgium, the Netherlands, and finally into Germany. Throughout this time he kept his own diary, as well as helping to write the regiment’s war diary when the official diarists were busy. He would carry on this work and though he died before the official history was published, he is credited with doing much of the work on Warpath.

Returning home, McNairn had aspirations of writing, either as a journalist or in longer form. Unfortunately, in June 1946, he was diagnosed with an especially virulent form of TB, tuberculous empyema. Likely contracted while still in Europe, he was transferred to Hamilton’s Mountain Sanatorium for care, but would never recover. McNairn died 5 September 1946 and was buried in Grove Cemetery, in Dundas.

Samuel Nickle was born in Winnipeg in 1913/14 to Olga and Sam Nickle. The family moved to Calgary in 1917. In 1935 he started the Nickle Map Service Ltd. In 1935 in response to the Turner Valley oil boom. During the Second World War he served in the Calgary Highlanders and was commissioned in the Intelligence Corps in 1943.

Following the war he resumed his mapping business working in the oil and gas industry. He continued to support the Calgary Highlanders and was appointed to Honorary Colonel. He passed away on 26 January 1994.

Gary Barwin is the author of twenty-six books of poetry and fiction, as well as works for children and teens. He is also a composer, multidisciplinary artist, and owner and operator of Serif of Nottingham Editions, a Hamilton-based small press. Through Serif of Nottingham and other small presses, Barwin has also published numerous chapbooks, broadsides, and pamphlets.

Barwin was born in 1964 in Northern Ireland. His family immigrated to Canada in the 1970s. In 1985, Barwin graduated from York University with a BFA in music and a BA in creative writing. He went on to complete a PhD in music composition at SUNY Buffalo.

Barwin has taught creative writing at several colleges and universities, including King’s University College (Western University), McMaster University, and Mohawk College. He has also participated in writer in residence programs at Toronto Public Library, Western University, London Public Library, McMaster University, Hamilton Public Library, Wilfrid Laurier University, and others. In addition, Barwin has taught creative writing to at-risk youth through Hamilton’s ArtForms program.

Barwin’s novel Yiddish for Pirates was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel also won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and the Hamilton Literary Award. Barwin is also a four-time recipient of the Hamilton Book of the Year award and a co-winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Keith Patrick was born on Sept 22, 1918, in Saint John New Brunswick. He was the son of Hugh and Lily Patrick, and had six brothers: W.E. Robinson, Ronald, Edmond, Raymond, Kenneth Roland, and Murray. He received an elementary and high school education in Saint John, West Haven, Connecticut, and Lynn, Massachusetts. He was employed by American News Co. in Lynn at the outbreak of war, prompting him to return to New Brunswick to enlist. Keith served in the R.C.A.F. from 1940 to 1945 as a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner. He received training at Wireless School in Calgary and Bombing and Gunnery School in Macdonald, Manitoba. His overseas postings included Operational Training Units and Ferry Command in England; in Egypt with the RAF 108 Squadron; and in France with the 427 Lion Squadron.

He was on his second tour with the RCAF 427 Squadron when his Halifax bomber was shot down in Pas-de-Calais, France, on the night of June 12, 1944. Seriously injured, he and his pilot, Don Fulton, were sheltered by members of the French Resistance. They were liberated in September 1944. Keith retired from the RCAF in February 1945 at the rank of Flight Lieutenant.

After the war, he had a successful career as a Purchasing Manager with Ford Motor Co. in Saint John, Canadair in Montreal and Fleet Manufacturing and Horton-CBI in Fort Erie.

Keith married Phyllis Taylor on June 29, 1946. They had three children, Charmian, Janet, and Philip. Keith self-published his memoirs, To the Stars, with his daughter Janet Lee MacNeil in 2014. Keith passed away in 2021, in Kitchener, Ontario.

Rachel Manley is an author of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, and member of a prominent Jamaican political family about whom she has written several lauded memoirs. She is the daughter of Michael Manley, a Jamaican politician who served three terms as prime minister (1972-80, 1989-92). Her paternal grandparents are Edna Manley, a sculptor and arts educator, and Norman Manley, co-founder of the Jamaican People’s National Party and the first Premier of Jamaica.
Rachel Manley was born in Cornwall, England in 1947 to Michael Manley and his second wife, Jacqueline Kammelard. At the age of two, she was sent to Jamaica, where she was raised by her paternal grandparents in their home, Drumblair. In 1969, Manley receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (Special Honours) from the University of the West Indies.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Manley published three volumes of poetry and contributed to several magazines and literary journals, including The Jamaica Journal, Caribbean Quarterly, and Focus. She also worked in a variety of roles, including as a high school teacher and member of the radio advertising department of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1980-1986). In 1979, she received the Jamaica Centennial Medal for poetry.
In 1986, Manley immigrated to Canada, where she would eventually settle in Toronto. In 1989, Manley edited a version of her grandmother’s diaries, published by Andre Deutsch under the title Edna Manley: The Diaries.
Manley began writing family memoirs in the 1990s, publishing Drumblair, a book about her childhood with her grandparents, in 1996. The book was critically acclaimed, winning the 1997 Governor General’s Award for English language non-fiction. This volume was the first in a memoir trilogy; it was followed by Slipstream, about Michael Manley (2000), and Horses in Her Hair, about Edna Manley (2008).
These works were followed by two additional novels, The Black Peacock (2017) and The Fellowship (2019). The Black Peacock was shortlisted for the 2018 Amazon First Novel award.
Manley has received many writing fellowships over the years, including the Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellow (Literature) from Radcliffe College, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Fellowship; and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Poetry: Prisms (1972) Poems 2 (Coles Printery, 1978) A Light Left On (Peepal Tree, 1992)
Non-fiction: Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996) Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000) In My Father’s Shade (UK version of Slipstream) (BlackAmber Books, 2004) Horses in Her Hair: A Granddaughter’s Story (Key Porter Books, 2008)
Fiction: The Black Peacock (Cormorant Books, 2017) The Fellowship (Cormorant Books, 2019)

Alan Walker, Doctor of Music, F.R.S.C., university professor and writer, was born in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England on 6 April 1930. He was educated at the Guildhall School of Music and at Durham University, where he specialized in piano, theory, harmony and counterpoint. In his early career, he lectured at the Guildhall School of Music from 1959 to 1961, and at London University from 1954 to 1970.

Walker was a producer at the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1961 to 1971, and has contributed to programmes at the BBC and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music at City University in London from 1984 to 1987 and has been a Professor of Music at McMaster University since 1971, where he was Chairman of the Department from 1971 to 1980 and again from 1990 to 1993. Walker is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Hungarian Liszt Society Medal in 1980, the American Liszt Society Medal in 1984, and the Pro Cultura Hungaria Medal in 1995. He was awarded an honorary doctorate, D. Litt (honoris causa), from McMaster University in 2002. In January 2012, he received the Knight's Cross of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, one of Hungary's highest honours.

He is the author of A Study in Music Analysis, 1962, An Anatomy of Musical Criticism, 1968, Franz Liszt, 1971, Robert Schumann, 1976, Franz Liszt: Volume One, 1983, (for which he won the James Tait Black Award in 1983, and Yorkshire Post Music Book of the Year Award in 1984), Franz Liszt: Volume Two, 1989, Franz Liszt: Volume Three, 1996, and The Death of Franz Liszt, 2002. He co-authored, with Gabriele Erasmi, Liszt, Carolyne, and the Vatican: The Story of a Thwarted Marriage, 1991, and was the editor of Symposium on Chopin, 1967, Symposium on Liszt, 1970, Symposium on Schumann, 1972, The Diary of Carl Lachmund: An American Pupil of Liszt, 1995, and Hans von Bülow: a life and times, 2009. He has written over 100 articles for learned journals including a major entry on Franz Liszt for the latest edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001. His biography, Fryderyk Chopin, was launched in October 2018 to much acclaim and has subsequently been translated into numerous languages.

Born in 1924, Dr. Ian Spenser received his undergraduate training from the University of Birmingham. He completed his postdoctoral work at the University of London, King's College in 1952 and went on to complete his D.Sc in organic and biochemistry at the University of London in 1969. Dr. Spenser began his academic career at McMaster as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry in the Chemistry Department in 1957. He is currently a professor emeritus in the Chemistry Department. He has served the university in numerous capacities including terms on the McMaster Board of Governors and the Senate. Dr. Spenser has received numerous honors throughout his long and distinguished career. These honors include: the FRIC (Fellowship, Royal Institute of Chemistry, 1957), the FCIC (Fellowship, Chemical Institute of Canada, 1957), the FRSC (Fellowship, Royal Society of Canada, 1980), and the FRSC (UK) (Fellowship, Royal Society of Chemistry, 1980). He died in Dundas, Ontario on December 28, 2022.

Morris Biderman was born in 1908 in Chenchine, a small town near Kielce, Poland. He was the youngest of five sons; his father immigrated to Canada when he was four years old. Morris’s childhood memories of Poland include the Russian and German troops fighting in his town during the Great War, and the 1918 Kielce Pogrom, which prompted his family to join his father in Toronto. The family emigrated to Canada in 1920, living on Leonard Avenue, then later Bellevue Avenue, in Toronto; he attended Ryerson Public School until he dropped out at age 16. Morris then entered the trades as a needle worker and became involved in Leftist politics. He joined the Freedom Choir (Freiheit Gesang), which was held at Alhambra Hall, 450 Spadina Avenue, which housed the Labour League (a Toronto-based, Communist-led secular Jewish organization) and in 1927 he joined the Young Communist League. He worked as an under presser and was later hired as an operator for sportswear at Eaton’s, where he worked until 1937.

In 1937, Morris joined the Labour League and became manager of Der Kamf, the Communist weekly Yiddish newspaper, later renamed Der Vochenblatt. When the Communist party was briefly outlawed during the Second World War, Der Kamf was closed, and Morris returned to work in the sportswear industry. In 1942, he became president of the Labour League. In 1945, he was elected as the first national secretary to the newly founded United Jewish People’s Order. In 1955, Morris was one of eight delegates in a delegation chosen by the Canada-Soviet Friendship Society who visited the Soviet Union. Following the revelations of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, Morris broke with the Communist Party and resigned from the UJPO at their annual conference held in December 1959 at Toronto’s Union Station. He later co-founded a new organization, the New Fraternal Jewish Association. In 2000, he wrote his memoir, A Life on the Jewish Left: An Immigrant’s Experience (Toronto: Onward Publishing).

Morris married Minnie Usprich (1909-2001) in September 1929. Morris’ older brother Dave Biderman is the father of Ruth Borchiver.

Stewart Smith was born in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. His father, A.E. Smith, was a social gospel church minister in Brandon and leader of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In 1923, Stewart moved to Toronto and began organizing. The following year he accepted an offer from the CPC to become the National Secretary of the Young Communist League. In 1926, he attended the Lenin School in Moscow and was later appointed to the Political Bureau of the CPC. In 1937, he was elected alderman on the Toronto City Council as the first communist elected to office in Toronto’s history. In 1946, he was elected to the Board of Control. Stewart was a prominent member of the Labor-Progressive Party of Ontario and served as party leader between 1951 and 1957. He resigned from the Communist Party of Canada in 1957.

Joseph (Yosef) Baruch Salsberg was born in Lagow, in the Opatow district of Radom Gubernica, (now Poland, then under Russian rule) in 1902. He was the son of Sarah-Gitel and Abraham, a baker who worked in Canada as a junk peddler after immigrating in 1910. In 1913, the Salsberg family immigrated to Toronto to join Abraham, and settled Toronto’s Jewish district on Cecil Street. J.B. quit school at age fourteen and acquired a trade in the textile industry; he later joined the United Hatters, Cap, and Millinery Worker International Union and became a union organizer. He married Dora Wilensky (1901-1959), a social worker who would later head Toronto Jewish Family and Child Services. Salsberg organized in Toronto, Montreal, New York, and Chicago and became a key figure in the Worker’s Unity League, the Canadian Friends of the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party of Canada. He was elected to Toronto City Council as an alderman of Ward 4 in 1938 and 1943. Between 1943 and 1955 he represented the St. Andrew riding in Toronto in the Ontario Parliament as a member of the Labor-Progressive party. Due to his criticism of the Soviet Union, he was expelled from the CPC in October 1956. In 1959, he founded the New Fraternal Jewish Association. Following the end of his political career, he continued to write and speak on Leftist and Jewish topics.

Norman Penner was born in Winnipeg, into a Mennonite family from Ukraine. He is the son of Jacob Penner, a revolutionary socialist and organizer of the Winnipeg General Strike, and Rose Shapack, a Russian Jewish immigrant. His parents met at an address by Emma Goldman. His father was a founder of the Social Democratic Party of Canada and the Communist Party of Canada and was elected to Winnipeg city council in 1933. As a child, Norman became a celebrated orator with the Young Pioneers. After high school, he worked as a full-time officer of the Communist Party of Canada from 1938 to 1941. He enlisted in the Canadian Army and served overseas during World War II. After returning to Canada, he became National Youth Director of the Communist Party. He unsuccessfully ran for office in the 1951 Ontario election and the 1953 federal election. He broke from the Communist Party in 1957 and later returned to school, earning a doctorate from the University of Toronto. He became a Political Science professor at York University’s Glendon College until his retirement in 1995.

Sam Lipshitz was born on 14 February 1910 in Radom, Poland. He was sent to live with an aunt in Montreal at age 17, where he joined the Jewish Cultural Club of Montreal. He joined the Young Communist League while working at the Jewish Public Library. He was dismissed from the library following the 1929 Hebron Massacre because he aligned himself with the Soviet interpretation of the event. He married Manya Lipshitz on 20 January 1930 and they settled in Toronto. He became editor of Der Kamf (later renamed Vochenblatt) in 1932. He was appointed secretary of the party’s Anti-Fascist Committee in 1933, became head of the Jewish National Committee and sat on the Party’s Central Committee from 1943 to 1946. He was arrested and briefly detained in the Don Jail with Tim Buck and fourteen other party leaders in 1942. He joined the executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1943. Through the Congress, he was sent to Poland in 1945 to report on the condition of Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust. He and Manya visited the USSR in 1956 and shortly following their return, they resigned from the Communist Party. Sam went on to a career as an editor, author, and printer.

Manya Kantorowicz was born in Bialystok, Poland in December 1906. The youngest daughter of nine children; her mother was a baker, and her parents were secular Jews in the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) tradition. She developed an early interest in Communist politics. At age 13, she left Bialystok, Poland and joined the Twelfth Children’s Work Commune in Vitesbsk, Russia; and entered the Teachers’ Seminary there in 1923. In 1926 she immigrated to Montreal where her brothers had earlier settled. She joined the Young Communist League in Montreal immediately following her arrival. She married Sam Lipshitz on 20 January 1930. They moved to Brunswick Street in Toronto, and she began a 25-year career teaching Yiddish and Jewish History at the Morris Winchevsky School, operated by the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO). In 1977, Manya published a memoir of her recollections of Jewish life in Russia and immigrating to Canada, titled Bletlekh fun a shturmisher tsayt. It was published in translation as Time Remembered: A Jewish Children’s Commune in the Soviet Union in the 1920s (Toronto: Lugus Publications, 1991).

Sarah Kirzner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Toronto. Her parents were from Warsaw, Poland. Her sister immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and her brother immigrated to Saskatchewan at age 16, where he became involved in Leftist politics. She became involved in the Young Communist League at age 18, when her brother encouraged the group to recruit her. She became involved in the Office and Store Employees Union, fighting for a $12.50 per week minimum wage. At the YCL, she met her husband Paul, and became leader of the Toronto YCL group named for Norman Bethune. After being disillusioned by Communist politics, particularly following the Hitler-Stalin Pact, she left the Communist Party officially in 1956.

Sarah Kirzner was the wife of Paul Kirzner.

Paul Kirzner was born into a secular Jewish family in Toronto. His father was active in the Bundist movement, and one of the founders of the Toronto Cloakmakers’ Union in Canada. He joined the Young Communist League in 1932. He later formed a small company which distributed Soviet films. In 1940, he joined a closed group of the Communist Party of Canada and the Labour League. In 1949, he was a delegate of the UJPO to the Canadian Peace Congress. He was an original member of the New Fraternal Jewish Association, founded in 1960, though he later became less active due to a disagreement about Israel. He was an active member of the NDP and served on the provincial council and was treasurer of the Toronto area council.

Paul Kirzner was the husband of Sarah Kirzner.

Rose Eizenstraus was born in 1913. Her parents were socialist atheists, and she was raised in the Toronto Jewish community. At an early age, she became involved in the Young Pioneers. In 1939, she was Tim Buck’s private secretary. Rose was one of the founding members of the New Theatre Group in Montreal. In Toronto, she was involved in the Belmont Theatre Group and the Theatre of Action. She performed in the notorious play, Eight Men Speak, in the role of Zelda, during its sole performance at Toronto’s Standard Theatre on December 4, 1933.

Rose was the wife of Dave Kashtan.

Joshua (Joe) Gershman was born in Sokolov, Ukraine, in 1903. In 1921, he was sent to Winnipeg to find his father who had immigrated earlier. He found work as a fur dyer, and soon joined the Communist Party of Canada. With the Party, he founded the Kompartey (the National Jewish Committee of the Communist Party). He was a union organizer in Quebec for the Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers. Between 1937 and 1972, Joe was the editor of Der Kamf (renamed Vochenblatt in 1940), the Yiddish communist newspaper.

Dave Kashtan was born in Montreal in 1912. His parents, Dasha and Solomon Kashtan were born in Ukraine. Fleeing tsarist antisemitic oppression, they settled in the Mile End neighbourhood in Montreal where his father worked as a labourer, and later opened a small grocery store. He left school at age 13. He became interested in Communism at a young age through the influence of his brother Bill, who later led the Communist Party of Canada. Dave joined the orchestra of the Young Pioneer Club, playing the mandolin. He briefly found work as a steamfitter, until he was compelled to leave the trade due to his health. In 1929, he was appointed organizer of the YCL. On 19 January 1931, the Montreal Council of Unemployed held a meeting at the Labour Temple; the meeting was raided and its five speakers, including Dave and Fred Rose, were charged with sedition. Dave was sentenced to one year imprisonment at the Bordeaux Jail. Dave was also an active member of the Workers Sports Association of Canada and was appointed national secretary. In 1938, he was appointed national secretary of the Young Communist League. During the 1953 Canadian Federal Election, Dave ran unsuccessfully for the York Centre riding, as a member of the Labor-Progressive Party. He left the Party in 1960.

Dave was the husband of Rose (Eizenstraus) Kashtan.