Amanda Peters is a mixed-race woman of Mi’kmaq and European ancestry, born and raised in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia.
In 2022, Amanda completed a Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indians Arts (IAIA) in New Mexico. In 2021, Amanda won the Indigenous Voices Award for her work of short fiction, Waiting for the Long Night Moon. She was also selected to participate in the 2021 Writers Trust of Canada Rising Stars Program by Metis poet and novelist, Katherena Vermette.
Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Dalhousie Review, and Filling Station Magazine.
Amanda’s first novel, The Berry Pickers, was published in 2023 by HarperCollins in Canada and by Catapult in the US. The novel was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in Canada, and won the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in the US. The Berry Pickers won the Dartmouth Book Award and the Crime Writers of Canada First Crime Novel Award, and has been translated into sixteen languages around the world. Her most recent book of short fiction, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, was published August, 2024, to critical acclaim.
Selected Speaking Topics
The Berry Pickers: When my dad realized that I was serious about my writing, he encouraged me to write about his experiences in the blueberry fields of Maine when he was a kid. The whole family would go down in the summers and pick berries to make money. The Mi’kmaq still do this. I told him I wrote fiction, but he wanted me to see the fields. So, in August 2017, my dad and I embarked on a father-daughter road trip to Maine. He showed me the fields he used to work with my grandparents and aunts, and uncles. He told me so many stories, many of which I recorded. While The Berry Pickers is fiction, it was inspired by those stories, and the stories of so many Mi’kmaq who came to me or to my dad with their own stories of the fields
Writing as Ceremony – Finding my Voice as an Indigenous Woman Through Writing: I have always struggled with my identity as a mixed-race woman and writing this book and telling these stories have led me to accept and love who I am as a Mi’kmaq. A friend, and wise Mi’kmaq, once told me that my writing is my ceremony, it’s how I connect to my culture and it’s one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me.
To book Amanda Peters, contact Rob Firing at rob@transatlanticagency.com