We are thrilled to chat with best-selling author Lawrence Hill.

His latest book, Beatrice and Croc Harry is his debut middle-grade school book, which follows the story of Beatrice, a brave and resilient Black girl on her adventure of identity and healing. This book shows readers the power of friendship, forgiveness, and the magic of storytelling.

There will be a live Q&A session at the end, so please bring your questions.

Copies of Beatrice and Croc Harry can be found here.  

Note: This program is virtual and is delivered through Zoom and YouTube Live.

The host for tonight’s event is Colleen James. Colleen is a Professor and Program Coordinator in the School of Business at Conestoga College and the Founder and Principal Consultant of Divonify Inc.

Lawrence Hill is the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Book of Negroes, which was made into a six-part TV mini-series, and The Illegal, both of which won CBC Canada Reads. His previous novels, Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood, became national bestsellers. Hill’s nonfiction work includes Blood: The Stuff of Life, the subject of his 2013 Massey Lectures, and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. In January 2022, HarperCollins Canada will publish Hill’s eleventh book -- the novel Beatrice and Croc Harry.

Hill’s volunteer work has included Crossroads International, the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, Book Clubs for Inmates, and The Ontario Black History Society, and Walls to Bridges – a non-profit group offering university courses to incarcerated Canadians. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph who has spent more than a decade volunteering in book clubs in federal penitentiaries. In 2019, through Walls to Bridges, he taught a third-year undergraduate memoir writing course to women incarcerated in the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener ON.

Currently, Hill is writing screenplays for a TV miniseries in development, as well as a new novel about the thousands of African-American soldiers who travelled from military bases in the Deep South to help build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and Yukon during World War Two. A member of the Order of Canada, he lives in Hamilton ON.

More about Beatrice and Croc Harry: Beatrice, a young girl of uncertain age, wakes up all alone in a tree house in the forest. How did she arrive in this cozy dwelling, stocked carefully with bookshelves and oatmeal accoutrements? And who has been leaving a trail of clues, composed in delicate purple handwriting?

So begins the adventure of a brave and resilient Black girl’s search for identity and healing in bestselling author Lawrence Hill’s middle-grade debut. Though Beatrice cannot recall how or why she arrived in the magical forest of Argilia—where every conceivable fish, bird, mammal and reptile coexist, and any creature with a beating heart can communicate with any other—something within tells her that beyond this forest is a family that is waiting anxiously for her return.

Just outside her tree-house door lives Beatrice’s most unlikely ally, the enormous and mercurial King Crocodile Croc Harry, who just may have a secret of his own. As they form an unusual truce and work toward their common goal, Beatrice and Croc Harry will learn more about their forest home than they ever could have imagined. And what they learn about themselves may destroy Beatrice’s chances of returning home forever.

To register for this free event, click here!