With Betty Keller, Rosella Leslie co-wrote Bright Seas, Pioneer Spirits as well as Sea Silver: Inside British Columbia's Salmon Farming Industry. This led to her contribution as a co-author for A Stain Upon The Sea (Harbour, 2004), which won the 2005 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Born in Edmonton, she wrote The Sunshine Coast: A Place To Be as a resident of Sechelt.

Her novel The Goat Lady's Daughter (NeWest Press, 2006) concerns two eccentric sisters in a rustic cabin who unintentionally adopt an abandoned baby girl on the West Coast. Gentle Florrie welcomes baby Jen, having lost her own children, but wily Mag mostly prefers to behave as if Jen is a nuisance.

In her book Drift Child (NeWest, 2010), a divorced, depressed woman's life changes when she is forced to care for three traumatized, orphaned children.

The Federov Legacy (Caitlin, 2013) is an historical novel about two women, one from Canada and the other from Ukraine, who are brought together amid war and revolution in Eastern Europe during World War I.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
A Stain upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming

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Losing Us: A Dementia Caregiver's Journey
(FriesenPress $13.99) 978-1-03-915640-1

Publishers description: Losing Us: A Dementia Caregiver’s Journey, is a candid, compassionate and sometimes humorous memoir of Rosella Leslie’s heartbreaking struggles and triumphs during her twelve years as her husband’s primary caregiver. It is also an informal guide to dementia caregiving, including links to helpful resources for caregivers, their friends, families and communities. The poems that begin and end each chapter capture the frustration and sorrow of her husband’s ever-shifting cognitive abilities and the emotional rollercoaster Leslie rides, rising to heights of acceptance, joy and resolve, then plunging to valleys of guilt, doubt and despair. She urges caregivers to accept dark thoughts and harsh feelings as a natural response to being in an impossible situation, and to keep putting one foot in front of the other as they move toward the faint light of hope that shines at the end of this very dark tunnel.

BOOKS:

Drift Child (NeWest, 2010) 978-1-897126-71-4 $19.95

Bright Seas, Pioneer Spirits (Harbour, 1996, revised and updated, 2009). With Betty Keller.

Sea Silver: Inside British Columbia's Salmon Farming Industry. With Betty Keller.

A Stain Upon The Sea (Harbour, 2004)

The Goat Lady's Daughter (NeWest Press, 2006). 1-897126-06-9

The Federov Legacy (Caitlin Press, 2013)

The Cougar Lady: Legendary Trapper of Sechelt Inlet (Caitlin Press, 2014) $22.95 978-1-927575-63-5

Losing Us: A Dementia Caregiver’s Journey (FriesenPress, 2022) 9781039156401

[BCBW 2014] "Fiction"