For some years, Shonda Buchanan left her hometown of Kalamazoo to move out west, but more recently, she has returned. Buchanan brings a wealth of talent to our community. She is an Oxfam Ambassador; Twice Pushcart Nominee; PEN Emerging Voices Fellow/Mentor Winner, and recipient of the 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Buchanan is the author of five books. Her newest, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone (RIZE, 2025), will be out in May.
“I’m a poet first and foremost,” Buchanan says. “I started writing poems here in Kalamazoo where I was born and raised. Before Black Indian, the memoir, I have two collections of poems … and all the while, as I’m writing poems, I am writing this memoir. This is what writers do. We are always straddling projects. I had been straddling writing poems about Nina probably since 2007.”
When Buchanan says writers tend to straddle multiple projects at once, she is also referring to her decision to move back to Kalamazoo from her home in Los Angeles, where she taught in Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. She now teaches at Western Michigan University.
“We are straddling different ways of expressing ourselves,” she says. “One of the things I knew I wanted to do was to come home, back to Kalamazoo. I wanted to immerse myself in the poetry scene and see who are the amazing poets out here already.”
Buchanan discovered there were many. She became a board member for the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival after reading her own poems on the festival stage.
“I read my poems, and by the time I left the stage, two people came up to me and invited me on the Festival board,” she says. She began serving on the board in 2024.
Shonda Buchanan earned both her BA and MA in English at Loyola Marymount University, and her MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University. She is a descendant of the Mende African nation of Sierra Leone, and of the Coharie, Choctaw, and Eastern Band Cherokee North American nations.
The 2025 Kalamazoo Poetry Festival, a Celebration of Community Poets, will take place on April 24, 2025, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., at Northside Association for Community Development 612 N Park Street. It is an annual event that is part of the National Poetry Month Festival Week. The Festival combines multiple organization partnerships and more than ten local poets and musicians.
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