Literary Editor of Harriet Tubman Press, her second collection of poetry, Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country, was published by San Francisco Bay Press.
Her first book of poetry, Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? was nominated for the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Library of Virginia Book Awards. An Eloise Klein-Healy Scholarship recipient, a Sundance Institute Writing Arts Fellow, a Jentel Artist Residency Fellow and a PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellow, Buchanan has received grants from the California Community Foundation, Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts Big Read Program and several grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Black Indian, her memoir, begins the saga of these migration stories of Free People of Color communities exploring identity, ethnicity, landscape and loss.įor the last 18 years, Buchanan has taught creative writing, composition and critical theory at Loyola Marymount University, Hampton University, and William & Mary College. Greene and Buchanan also discuss the ways in which stories have given Black Indians and African Americans a way to survive and the value of the counternarrative in the literature of Black writers.Īward-winning poet and educator Shonda Buchanan (1968) was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a daughter of Mixed Bloods, tri-racial and tri-ethnic African American, American Indian and European-descendant families who migrated from North Carolina and Virginia in the mid-1700s to 1800s to Southwestern Michigan. Buchanan addresses the intricate relationship between African Americans and Indians and describes how themes such as abuse, addiction, violence, healing, and spirituality have been recurring themes in the stories of her heritage and are constant themes in the lives of many African Americans and Black Indians. They discuss Buchanan’s mixed heritage and her motivation for writing this memoir.
Brenda Greene interviews Shonda Buchanan, author of Black Indian: A Memoir (Wayne State University Press, 2019).
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