It just connected ethnicity, race, and modalities, stuff that I hadn’t thought about before. I realized I could say things in a way that reflected what I felt.

That was a narrative I grew up with. That book taught me that I could use language to redefine myself. In one of Langston Hughes’ poems, he wrote on the concept of being mulatto and multi-racial. The first time I read it, I thought, “Wow, Black people are talking about what it means to be Black. SB: There’s an anthology of new Negro and Harlem Renaissance poetry called “ I Am the Darker Brother.” Serendipitously, it came out the same year I was born, 1968. What was your coming of age like? When did you discover your love of language and writing? For me, it’s always been about using language to create a different paradigm. The themes of my memoir Black Indian are family dysfunction and trying to heal through it it’s about racial disparity and institutional racism, the evolution of racial formation, and then how that impacted my family, over the centuries, and then ultimately, directly, how that impacted me and my immediate family growing up in a violent childhood. Shonda Buchanan: As a writer and professor, I had always been striving for how to heal with language how to use language as a tool for transformation, redemption, transgression how to use what I do as a poet, a memoirist, as a fiction writer, as an essayist, to always level the playing field or show a sense of disparity, and how that disparity can change equality. Immediately, she gravitated to the theme of healing, agreeing with me that art and health are inextricably connected.

Initially, Shonda was interested in my background, as a writer and psychologist. Over the summer, we met via Zoom to discuss the power of ancestry, her multi-cultural identity formation, and wisdom gathered along her writer’s journey. She is the author of the memoir Black Indian, and the poetry collections Equipoise and Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? Now a content producer for Push Black, Buchanan has added her voice to the nation’s largest non-profit media organization for Black Americans, currently serving nine million people across all platforms.

Award-winning author, poet, essayist, and educator, Shonda Buchanan has been writing since childhood.

Black indian shonda buchanan