Socio-cultural anthropologist Susanna Barnes, and award-winning writer and poet Patria Rivera have joined the Board of Trustees of Canadian Jesuits International.
The two new members attended the full-day meeting of the Board of Trustees on November 11, 2023.
Barnes is a social anthropologist who currently teaches at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon. Her work has focused on customary governance and land tenure, colonial and post-colonial history and international development. She is committed to the work and the mission of the Jesuits, having worked at the Jesuit Refugee Service offices in Rome, in East Timor, and in Phnom Penh. Barnes has also worked as a consultant for the World Health Organization in East Timor, and the International Centre for Transitional Justice in Indonesia.
From 1994 to 2016, Rivera served as editor of Catholic Missions in Canada Magazine, a multi-awarded publication which features work in remote and isolated communities in the North. She was news editor of The Catholic Register 1987 to 1994. A member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, Rivera’s first poetry collection, Puti/White, was shortlisted for the 2006 Canadian Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She has also published three other books of poems, and in November, Cormorant Books published a book she co-edited, Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing.

Above: Photo of Patria Rivera, by Polina Teif