Kalisha Buckhanon is one of the most important, well-read and dedicated writers, literary advocates and intellectuals working in America today. She has Bachelors and Masters Degrees in English from the University of Chicago, and her MFA in Creative Writing from the New School in New York City. She has been reading books and writing stories as a passion since she was 6 years old. Due to the extreme sensitivity which defines most artists and writers, her dream to become a veterinarian was derailed by her tears during dissections; so today, we have a woman who has parlayed passions for reading, writing and books starting with animal books and stories into a lifelong educational, creative and inspirational pursuit! She plans to work and retire near a college campus where she can teach and open an animal sanctuary, in addition to teaching at or supervising schools abroad in Black nations.


The novel went on to win a 2006 American Library Association ALEX Award, the first Terry McMillan Young Author Award where she was personally selected by the most influential Black female writer of all time and the Audie Award in Literary Fiction. The novel is published in London and Paris. It chronicles ten years in the lives of a young Harlem couple separated by the criminal justice system, and she documents their love story and the mystery surrounding the young man's imprisonment through letters. The book drew comparisons to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Her second novel, Conception, was released in 2008 by St. Martin's.  It is considered one of the most important African American novels of that year. It details the story of an unborn child who has traveled through time and history to await birth inside a 15-year-old Chicago girl seeking an abortion. In 2009, it won the Friends of American Writers Adult Literature Award--previously awarded to such novelists as Toni Morrison, Carl Sandburg and Sara Peretsky.  It was also a notable book for many online and monthly book clubs. Thematics were inspired in small part by her own teenaged parentage.


She has written in-depth historical pieces on jazz and tap history for the International Tap Association's magazine On Tap! As well as interviews for Rolling Out, Odyssey Couleur Black Travel Magazine and stories published in such publications as the esteemed Michigan Quarterly Review, with an advisory board including Joyce Carol Oates. Her third novel-in-progress is based upon a story published there entitled "Card Parties," which won the 2002 Chicago State University's Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Culture's Annual Zora Neale Hurston/Bessie Head Fiction Award.  She was on the cover of the January 2009 Issue of Mosaic Literary Magazine, in an article entitled "The Holistic Writer" where she talks candidly about her life, why she thinks reading and writing is a priceless power for Black peoples and how being a writer is really a practice of life over a profession. She can be visited at www.Kalisha.com or you can reach her manager Felicia Pride at felicia@thebacklist.net or 917.642.3892. She thanks you in advance for the interest!


In her youth, she won the Illinois Young Authors competition as well as awards from the NAACP ACT-SO Awards.  By the age of 24, she had won a coveted Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship for her very first novel manuscript entitled The Junction. She went to the New School where she worked with some of the finest American writers in the business, worked throughout New York City in schools as a teaching artist and solidified publication of her first novel when Sapphire, author of the critically acclaimed canonical novel PUSH (now a film entitled Precious), took her masters thesis to famed editor Tracy Sherrod who had become the agent for Tracy Sherrod Literary Services. That rough masters thesis was the powerful, groundbreaking novel Upstate (St. Martin's Press, New York, 2005), sold at an auction among New York City publishing houses.  Her writing is an extension of her belief in education, activism and healthy community relations; she has worked for the National Black MBA Association in Chicago, as well as been active at its ETA Creative Arts Foundation. In New York City, she worked for the Harlem Center for Education, Oasis Children’s Services and Legal Outreach. She counts Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, journalist and translator Achy Obejas, Bayo Ojikutu, Abigail Thomas, Hilton Als, Sapphire, the late great E. Lynn Harris (who gave her first major blurb) and National Book Award winner Dorothy Alison among her most important influences, mentors and supports.
She has spoken at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Arkansas, and the South Street Seaport Literary Series of Manhattan and as a guest writer at the Chicago, New York, Kankakee, Philadelphia and Brooklyn Public Libraries among other bookstores, youth organizations and high schools. She has been an honorary panelist at the American Library Association Annual Conference, the Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writers Conference, and The National Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference, Overton College's Annual Conference on Women's Literature and Gender Studies and the Harlem Book Fair. She has been interviewed on BBC London, WVON Chicago, NPR Chicago and Public Access talk shows in the Bronx, Atlanta and Chicago. She has been featured in such publications as Essence, Chicago Magazine, the New York Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Sun-Times, People, Fresh Direction (London), The London Observer, Britain's New Nation, Paris's Lire (Read), Black Beat, Jet Magazine, Black Issues Book Review and many, many others.