Kalisha Buckhanon Writer. Teacher. Activist

“Every Black person I know has been affected by the prison industrial complex. The Black family unit and relationships between Black men and women have both been shattered by it.” Kalisha Buckhanon

The writing bug bit Kalisha when she was only eight years old, and she began to enter her stories into the Annual Illinois Young Authors Competition. While she demonstrated solid talent in other academic areas, it was in literature and writing that Kalisha excelled the most. She wrote stories, read books constantly and put on plays at school and in church. Throughout grade school and later high school, Kalisha was mentored and encouraged by several English teachers in Kankakee School District 111 to continue to pursue writing and academics.

When Kalisha was just 11 years old, she pulled a rare first edition copy of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye off the shelf of the public library and also found an unreturned library copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son in her family’s attic. These two books served as Kalisha’s introduction into the world of serious literature, and she was hooked. By the age of 12 she had won a First Place Award and a trip to the Illinois Young Authors Conference, where she had her first encounters with professional, working writers.

While an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Kalisha was active on the campus and local arts scenes. She also tutored adults and children in literacy while pursuing a literature degree. She served in organizations and on committees where she helped to bring such luminaries as Sonia Sanchez, John Edgar Wideman, Nikki Giovanni, Angela Davis and Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott to the University of Chicago campus. Sonia Sanchez and Derek Walcott were especially influential in shaping Kalisha’s desire to become a “writer of the people”; both Sanchez and Walcott sacrificed sleep after long traveling days in order to treat the Black student planning committee to dinner after their appearances at the University. The first time Kalisha read her writing live (May of 1996), she shared the stage with the beautiful, late, legendary Gwendolyn Brooks. She also won a prestigious Andrew Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship, which allowed her to study early Black film and American literature under highly respected academics Kenneth Warren and Jacqueline Stewart. Though she was the first on both sides of her family to attend college, she was elected into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society and graduated in the top 2% of her 1999 class.

After graduation, Kalisha worked a series of day jobs in Chicago and continued to work on her writing at night. She finished two manuscripts and several stories in one year. One manuscript, a family saga entitled The Junction, was shopped but never sold; however, the judges at the Illinois Arts Council were so impressed with Kalisha’s writing in this piece that they awarded her a 2000 Artist Fellowship in Prose based upon its promise. In 2001, she moved to New York City in order to pursue her writing career further. She applied to several M.F.A. programs throughout the city, ultimately deciding on New School University because of the Departmental Scholarship she received and the opportunity to work with Sapphire, author of PUSH.

After settling into Harlem, she supported herself with freelance writing, temporary jobs and teaching opportunities with non-profits throughout New York City. By 2002, Michigan Quarterly Review editor Lawrence Goldstein had bought Kalisha’s first published story, “Card Parties,” a twist-of-fate tale about several Black women who gather weekly to play cards on Chicago’s South Side. This story also won the Zora Neale Hurston/Bessie Head Fiction Award at the 2002 CSU Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writer’s Conference.

After reading an article in Savoy magazine which reported that more Black males in America were behind bars than in college, Kalisha began Upstate in the fall of 2002. She wanted to write about the many friends and family members who knew, or were themselves, casualties of the criminal justice system. The eventual premise for Upstate—letters written back and forth between an incarcerated young man and his girlfriend—was created after Kalisha was inspired by Edwidge Danticat’s beautiful epistolary story “Children of the Sea” (Krik?Krak!); in the story, a young Haitian refugee in a boat bound for America pens letters back and forth with his girlfriend who has stayed behind to fight in the revolution. After the first ten letters of Upstate were finished, Sapphire encouraged Kalisha to abandon completing the collection of short stories that she had been working on and to instead carry Upstate through as a novel.

By the time Kalisha actually finished the novel, she had received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School without managing to find steady employment or a decent place to live once her housing circumstances changed. With two rejected manuscripts under her belt and not much money to continue to live in New York, Kalisha was ready to throw in the towel and leave Harlem until Sapphire walked a raw, unedited, first draft of Upstate over to the Tracy Sherrod Literary Agency. Tracy Sherrod’s passionate response to the slim manuscript and the story it contained encouraged Kalisha to continue polishing the novel with Sherrod’s seasoned editing suggestions. When Sherrod put Upstate on the New York City publishing scene, the interest in the story was surprisingly astounding. In late September/early October of 2003, an auction among several of New York City’s publishing companies resulted in Upstate finding a home with Editor Monique Patterson and St. Martin’s Press.