Joan Baxter is a Canadian journalist, award-winning author, development consultant, researcher and writer, and anthropologist. Since 1982, she has lived, raised two children and worked in seven countries in Africa – Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Mali and Sierra Leone – and made working trips to many others. She has written, reported and spoken widely on issues such as foreign direct investment in Africa, extractive industries, regulatory capture, environmental rights and justice, food sovereignty and sustainable farming and food systems. Now back in Canada, she has turned her attention to many of the same issues in her own country, both writing and speaking publicly about them.
Her seventh and most recent book, The Mill – Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest, was published in 2017 by Pottersfield Press. It traces the history of a controversial pulp mill in Nova Scotia, and garnered a great deal of publicity after the mill orchestrated a letter-writing campaign threatening to boycott Coles and Chapters bookstores, which led to the cancellation of a book signing in one Coles bookstore. For four months, The Mill was the best-selling book at Coles and Chapters / Indigo in Nova Scotia and it was shortlisted for four Atlantic Book awards in 2018, including the Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award, the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing, the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, and the Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing, which she won.
