Joan Boswell

Joan Boswell was born in Toronto and grew up in Ottawa, Edmonton, Oakville and Halifax. She graduated with an Honours BA in Economics and History from the University of New Brunswick, married and moved to the Northern Quebec bush.

After two years, she and her husband relocated in London, Ontario where she attended Teachers’ College and taught in a one-room, three-grade school on the Six Nations Oneida Indian Reserve.

The next move was to Ottawa where she returned to the joys of academic life and obtained an MA in Canadian Studies from Carleton University and a PhD from the University of Ottawa. Her thesis on the administration of Indian affairs covered the years the western Indians signed their treaties and grew out of her experience with and interest in the Six Nations.

During her university years, she won several undergraduate prizes as well as a Ford Foundation Fellowship, Ontario Government and Canada Council grants. These enabled her to continue her studies and pay for sitters to care for her four sons who grew up in those pre-computer days hating the sound of the typewriter and associating shoe-boxes with piles of well-thumbed cards. 

Degrees in hand, she worked for several years for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, researching the early treaties and the background for the agreement with the Inuit. 

Throughout her life, she has painted, and eventually the compulsion to improve and spend more time being creative overwhelmed her and she returned to the University of Ottawa to complete the course work for a BFA.

After ten solo shows and four posters produced by Posters International, she again switched her focus. This time writing was the attraction. Once she became a member of Ottawa’s notorious Ladies’ Killing Circle there was no turning back. She attended the Humber School of Writing and took a Humber College Correspondence Course with Isabel Huggin.

Today she lives in Toronto with three flat-coated retrievers and enjoys life with her four grown sons, their wives, and six grandchildren.
 

Selected Bibliography
The Hollis Grant mystery series:
Cut Off His Tale. Toronto: RendezVous Crime, 2005
Cut to the Quick. Toronto: RendezVous Crime, 2007

Short stories:
As a writer, Joan has had work published in magazines and several anthologies including Dead in the Water (Toronto, RendezVous Crime, 2005), Blondes in Trouble,  and Locked Up (Ottawa, Deadlock Press, 2007).

As a member of the Ladies’ Killing Circle, she has had stories in each of their six books: The Ladies’ Killing Circle, Cottage Country Killers, Menopause Is Murder, Fit to Die, Bone Dance,  Boomers Go Bad and the soon-to-be-released Going Out With a Bang and co-editing the last four books.
 

Awards:
The $10,000 Toronto Sunday Star short story contest in 2000

Website:
www.joanboswell.ca

Email:
jobo@magma.ca