Kalisha Buckhanon | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 1, 1977 Kankakee, Illinois, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author |
| Education | University of Chicago (BA, MA) New School University (MFA) |
| Notable awards | Alex Award (2006) |
| Website | |
| www | |
Kalisha Buckhanon (born April 1, 1977) [1] is an American author who writes frequently on literature, race and Black women's themes. She was educated at the University of Chicago and New School University. She is a 2006 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Born in Kankakee, Illinois, Buckhanon comes from a large middle-class Christian family. She was born when her parents, Kerry and Juwana Buckhanon, were teenagers. [2] Buckhanon began writing as a young woman. She was high school Class President and a community activist as a commitment her parents raised her with. She has remarked she grew up in a time when Black American teenagers were besieged with stereotypes as "crack babies", "welfare moms" and "gangbangers", and she saw her life experiences and voice as ways to "correct misconceptions of Black life for generations to come". [3] She found author Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye at Kankakee Public Library and became empowered to write from a Black female perspective. [4] Buckhanon received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago, [1] and a Masters of Fine Arts (M.F.A) in Creative Writing from New School University. [4] She studied as a humanities doctoral student at the University of Chicago, and obtained her Master of Arts in English from the program.
Buckhanon's first published short story was "Card Parties" in 2003 in the Michigan Quarterly Review . [5] Her first novel, Upstate, was published in 2005 by St. Martin's Press. The novel was sold in a publishing auction for a mid six-figure sum. [6] Upon its publication, Essence magazine named Buckhanon one of its "Three Writers to Watch". [7]
Upstate tells the story of a young New York couple, and won an award from the American Library Association. [8] The novel was called "wild and beautiful" by novelist Sapphire, "heartbreaking and true" by writer Dorothy Allison, and "intimate, wrenching" by novelist and journalist Achy Obejas. Author Terry McMillian called the book "honest" and stated that Buckhanon "captured real emotion". The book became a popular favorite among youth and urban teachers. [3] Upstate was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in Debut Fiction. The Upstate audiobook won the Audie Award for Literary Fiction.[ citation needed ]
In 2008, her second novel Conception was published, again by St. Martin's Press. [9] The novel tells the story of four months in the life of a young Chicago woman who discovers she is pregnant and wants to abort her unborn child, who also narrates part of the story. School Library Journal wrote that librarians should "recommend this moving novel to readers who enjoyed Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sapphire's PUSH". [10] The Chicago-based literary society Friends of American writers awarded the novel its 2009 Adult Literary Fiction Prize. [11]
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(May 2022) |
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Catherine Ann Asaro is an American science fiction and fantasy author, singer and teacher. She is best known for her books about the Ruby Dynasty, called the Saga of the Skolian Empire.
Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988).
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. The novel takes place in Lorain, Ohio, and tells the story of a young African-American girl named Pecola who grew up following the Great Depression. Set in 1941, the story is about how she is consistently regarded as "ugly" due to her mannerisms and dark skin. As a result, she develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for the blue eyes she equates with "whiteness".
Urban fiction, also known as street lit or street fiction, is a literary genre set in a city landscape; however, the genre is as much defined by the socio-economic realities and culture of its characters as the urban setting. The tone for urban fiction is usually dark, focusing on the underside of city living. Profanity, sex, and violence are usually explicit, with the writer not shying away from or watering-down the material. Most authors of this genre draw upon their past experiences to depict their storylines.
Martha Elizabeth "Libba" Bray is an American writer of young adult novels including the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Going Bovine, and The Diviners.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Marita Golden is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, professor, and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers.
Valerie Boyd was an American writer and academic. She was best known for her biography of Zora Neale Hurston entitled Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She was an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she taught narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism.
Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist. She has twice won the Giller Prize, for her novels Half-Blood Blues (2011) and Washington Black (2018).
Karla Francesca Holloway is an American academic. She is James B. Duke Professor of English & Professor of Law at Duke University, and holds appointments in the Duke University School of Law as well as the university's Department of English, Department of African & African American Studies, and Program in Women's Studies. Holloway is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective
Zelda Lockhart is a contemporary African-American writer, speaker, teacher and researcher. Her latest novel Trinity was published in July 2023. She is the director of LaVenson Press and Her Story Garden Studios. Her recent books include Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief by Doris Payne with Zelda Lockhart (2019), and 20/20: A Living & Learning poetry collection (2017). She is the author of three novels: Fifth Born (2003), Cold Running Creek (2006), and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle (2010). Her first novel was published to critical acclaim and was a finalist for an award—for a debut novel—from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Foundation. Her novels emphasize the struggles, sexual trauma, and triumphs of African and Native American women historically and contemporarily. Her research focuses on inquiries into intergenerational healing and the ways creating personal experience-based literature while consuming personal experience-based literature has the potential to be emotionally, psychologically, and socially transformative for individuals. Areas of interest are Black women and girls, Native populations, people of color, LGBT individuals and financially disenfranchised people. In her position as director of LaVenson Press and Her Story Garden Studios, Lockhart seeks to create a space where women can "self-define through writing and publishing." She is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literature at North Carolina Central University.
Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday. Author of fifteen novels, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is an American poet, novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, whose writing often focuses on culture and travel in the African diaspora. She has been the recipient of several awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the American Antiquarian Society. Her novels include The River Where Blood is Born (1997), which won the American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Best Fiction, and Hot Johnny , which was an Essence magazine bestseller in hardcover fiction. She has also taught literature and creative writing at educational institutions internationally, including at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Miami, Nova Southeastern University, the Writer's Studio at the University of Chicago, the North Country Institute for Writers of Color, the Hurston-Wright Writers Workshop, and Chicago State University.
Naomi Jackson is an American author most known for her novel The Star Side of Bird Hill, which was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. She is a Fulbright recipient, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Dawnie Walton is an American journalist and novelist. She is known for her novel, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, which won the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2022 Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award, and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |