Kalamazoo, Michigan native Shonda Buchanan is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University and Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Three-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Shonda is an Oxfam Ambassador, a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and a PEN America Mentor. Author of the award-winning memoir, Black Indian and The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, winner of the 2026 Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Poetry Book Award. Shonda’s other books include Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? and Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country and two poetry anthologies.
President of the Michigan Poetry Society, Shonda is the former Board President for Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, current Board member of the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival and the Kalamazoo Arts Council. Shonda has published in and/or written for Past Ten Journal, Poetry Daily, The Mississippi Review, Tab Journal, Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, LA Times Magazine, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today and Red Ink Journal. Shonda is shopping a second memoir and a book of poems about growing up in Kalamazoo.
Website: shondabuchanan.com
Instagram: @shondabuchanan
