Kalisha Buckhanon is a writer, speaker and commentator creating stories and media about African-Americans, women, love and justice.

Kalisha is author of the novels Upstate, Conception, Solemn and Speaking of Summer: a book pick of Essence, O Magazine, TIME, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmo, Buzzfeed, Lit Hub and more. Her stories are published in Fiction, Oxford American, Black Renaissance Noire, Michigan Quarterly Review and more. Her nonfiction appears in Beauty News NYC, CrimeReads, The London Independent and more. She was also seen on ID, BET and TV-One true crime shows as an expert. She writes and more at her blog negression.com.

Kalisha’s debut Upstate introduced her in such media as People, Elle, Marie Claire, The Guardian/London Observer and Essence as one of its "Three Writers to Watch." Chadwick Boseman co-narrates the audiobook and it won a Literary Fiction Audie Award. Terry McMillan gave Kalisha her only Young Author Award for the novel. It is published in the UK and France, an American Library Association ALEX Award winner, a Hurston/Wright Foundation Debut Fiction Finalist, a New York Public Library’s Best Books for Teens, an inaugural “Literature for Justice” title for National Book Foundation and a Diverse Voices Screenplay Finalist with Kalisha’s adaptation.

Her other honors include a Friends of American Writers Award for Conception, a Pushcart Prize nomination, a Zora Neale Hurston/Bessie Head Fiction Award at the Chicago Black Writers Conference, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and Phi Beta Kappa Society election. She has master’s and bachelor’s degrees in English from University of Chicago with a Creative Writing M.F.A. from The New School in New York City. She has taught preschoolers to seniors in numerous schools and programs across Chicago and New York City.