Lucinda Canty wears many hats: nurse-midwife, nursing professor, researcher, author, activist, historian, poet, and dreamer. An advocate for antiracism in nursing, she centers her work on nurses, midwifery, and maternal health equity. Dr. Canty’s three-decade nursing career is driven by her vision for a more equitable future for new mothers, nurses, and midwives, achieved by fusing science with creativity and care delivery with compassion.

While researching a topic for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Connecticut, Dr. Canty identified a serious gap in the literature on women who experienced severe complications during childbirth: only three of the 2,500 articles she found specifically looked at Black women’s childbirth experiences. Astonished but empowered to make a difference in her community, she began the crucial work of eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities in reproductive health, preventing maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity, and eliminating racism in nursing, which continues today. Her research uses a Black feminist approach to center on the experiences, perceptions, and voices of Black women to understand the issues and challenges they face and develop solutions to promote health equity.

Dr. Canty is the founder of Lucinda’s House, a maternal health collective that supports Black mothers and mothers of color and works to address structural and systemic issues in care through research, health education, and community engagement. She is a member of the National Black Nurses Association and serves a co-chair of the Black Maternal Health Taskforce.

As a Professor of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she, alongside mentor Peggy Chinn and Christina Nyirati, co-founded Overdue Reckoning on Racism in Nursing: a series of discussions on racism in nursing, which started in late 2020 to center the voices of nurses of color that often go overlooked.

Dr. Canty is published in various journals, including the American Journal of Nursing, Nursing Inquiry, Journal of Advanced Nursing, Birth, and Nursing Philosophy. She is a contributing editor for the Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health’s Ask the Midwife column. Additionally, she is a sought-after nurse scholar in addressing both maternal health equity and anti-racism initiatives.

She is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and the American College of Nurse Midwives. She is the 2023 Yale School of Nursing Alumni Association (YSNAA) Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient and the recipient of the 2023 Florence S. Wald Award from the Connecticut Nurses’ Association. She is the 2024 Columbia University School of Nursing 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award for Nursing Practice.

Her bold work doesn’t stop there: Dr. Canty’s passion also comes through in her expressive poetry and art. Inspired by everyday events she experiences as a Black woman and her reflections upon them, her words and paintings are an outlet for her pain and a reminder of her triumphs.