Shonda Buchanan

Editor of Voices from Leimert Park, Shonda Buchanan is an award-winning poet, fiction and narrative nonfiction writer. Recipient of the Brody Arts Fellowship from the California Community Foundation, the Denise L. Scott and Frank Sullivan Awards, an Eloise Klein-Healy Scholarship, a Big Read grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and several Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grants, Shonda is a Sundance Institute Writing Arts fellow and a PEN Center Emerging Voices fellow. In 2010, she won the poem of the year award from Long Story Short Ezine. She has freelanced for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today, and The International Review of African American Art. Shonda has published in Phati’tude Literary Magazine, Red Ink, Strange Cargo: An Emerging Voices Anthology, Step into a World: A Global Anthology of New Black Literature, Arise! Magazine, Def Jam Poetry’s Bum Rush the Page, Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 and Rivendell. Shonda served as judge of the North Carolina Arts Council Poetry Fellowship, the Virginia Commission for the Arts Fiction Contest, the Metrorail Public Art Project Poetry Contest, the 2012 Poetry Society of Virginia Student Poetry Contest, and the Creative Writing Youth Contest for the College Language Association. Shonda received her B.A. and M.A. from Loyola Marymount University in English and her M.F.A. from Antioch University. Board member of the Poetry Society of Virginia and Hampton Roads Writers, and poetry coordinator at the Peninsula Fine Arts Museum, Shonda is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Hampton University, teaching Creative Writing and Composition. www.shondabuchanan.com, www.pw.org/content/shonda_buchanan or email info@shondabuchanan.com.