She attended St. Joseph's School and the Port Arthur Collegiate Institute, where she won the first Canadian Federation of University Women scholarship given to an outstanding Grade 13 female student in the Lakehead.

For this ground-breaking research, Petrone was made an honorary Indian Chief by the Gull Bay Ojibwa and gained international recognition.

She formed 'I Literati', a local reading group which focused on Italy's cultural heritage in the fields of literature, art, music, history and film as well as on the Italian immigrant experience in North America.

Her latest book, finished during the last months of her life Schoolmarm (2007), where Penny recalls a teaching career that began at North Bay Normal School, her time spent in one-room schools in rural Port Arthur, and culminated at the Lakehead University Faculty of Education where she taught teachers.

In honour of her commitment, through the endowment of scholarships and bursaries of over a million dollars for students at the Lakehead University campus of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, (NOSM), the facility which houses the West Campus of the NOSM Health Sciences Library is now called the Dr. Serafina "Penny" Petrone Health Information Resource Centre.