Poet, memoirist, and fiction writer… Shonda Buchanan
Finding your heritage does more than just add value to who you are and who your family is but to your culture and the culture of others as well. There are wonderful stories to tell and lessons to learn even in the negativity of searching for your family. Recently we joined Shonda Buchanan, a poet, memoirist, and fiction writer she is a Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Hampton University teaching creative writing, composition, essay writing, editing, and research.
Shonda is also Author of Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, which was nominated for the Literary of Virginia Literary Contest and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Awards, and editor of Voices from Leimert Park, Shonda is an award-winning poet whose expertise includes Narrative Nonfiction, Contemporary American, African American, American Indian and Women’s Literature, and Comparative Literature, as well as canonical texts.
She freelanced for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, and Indian Country Today. She commentated for Marketplace Radio and was featured on National Public Radio’s Tell Me More. A culture and literary arts ambassador, her presentations, workshops, and lectures demonstrate her passion for exploring gender, ethnicity, family, heritage, landscape, environment and ancestry.
Hear more of our conversation at Vertikal LIVE Radio
Who’s Afraid of Black Indians – Available at Amazon
Who’s Afraid of Black Indians – Synopsis
Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? is a difficult yet beautiful collection of poetry that peeks into one American family’s cultural window. Wanting to forget the past, this chapbook of poetry explores the journey Shonda’s ancestors took from North Carolina to Tennessee, to Indiana and finally Michigan, and the flight and fight to escape racial persecution and racial classification. Yet it is also a book about the recovery of an identity–the intersection of Blacks and Indians in this country. Shonda and her family, like so many other “bi-racial” Native Americans, suffered from not knowing their full roots, and the ills of assimilation, all the while and enduring society’s ever-evolving definition of them. This book will hopefully help other Black Indians, as well as bi-racial and tri-racial peoples, research, reclaim and celebrate their multifaceted heritage.
Where you can find Shonda Buchanan
Website | Facebook | Instagram @ShondaBuchanan | More Publications
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