Featured Interview With Kalisha Buckhanon
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Kalisha Buckhanon’s novels are Solemn, Conception and Upstate. Her short stories are widely published in many online and university print literary journals. Her articles and essays appear on several popular women’s blogs and cultural websites. Her writing awards include an American Library Association ALEX Award, Friends of American Writers Award, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, and Terry McMillan Young Author Award. Kalisha’s work has received attention in major media outlets such as Essence, The Guardian, BBC-London, TV-One, People, Elle, Entertainment Weekly and Marie Claire. She has an M.F.A. from The New School in New York City, and her B.A. and M.A. in English from University of Chicago. She writes at her blog Negression.com.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was a kid when I first started making story books and kept on as I grew up, in various forms on typewriters back then. I first started creative writing seriously, and as I would have trained for any career, when I was an English major at University of Chicago. I took playwriting, screenwriting, and any book subjects I could. I helped bring in black authors. I edited the black student newspaper and wrote for other papers. I began showing my literature professors stories I cringe at now. I worked after graduation like I was supposed to, and had a lot going for myself. However, I sensed it was something else I was supposed to be doing. I moved to New York City when I was 24 to pursue my M.F.A. in Creative Writing at The New School.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
This fluctuates for me constantly. I read anything I can: cookbooks, dime-store and used paperbacks, children’s picture books, literary journals. So I have no “type” I am fanatic about. I read a lot of plays, classic and modern. I have tendencies to stick with classic novels and authors because of my schooling, training and general respect for them. But I keep with the times, including new authors and books I hear about. Some of my favorite new authors are Sapphire, Bernice McFadden, Dani Shapiro, Jesmyn Ward, Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat. My standards are Toni Morrison, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Rule, James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. I can read any of their books at any time cover to cover, even if I have read them before.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Solemn Redvine is a precocious Mississippi girl who senses a nearby baby may be her half-sibling: the outcome of her father’s mistakes with a married woman who lives in their mobile home community. After Solemn witnesses a man throw the baby down a community well, she struggles to understand the event, leaving her forever changed.
As Solemn finds refuge in fantasies of stardom as well as friendships with her brother’s wife and a nearby girl, the ill-fated baby’s doomed mother disappears without a trace. Solemn remains trapped by connections to the missing other woman and an honest cop who suspects more to the story than others on the small local police force want to see. When her father’s next mistake – a robbery – lands Solemn in a group home for troubled girls, she meets a Chicago delinquent who wants to escape. There, Solemn must face the truth of who she really is and what she is really made of.
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