Kalamazoo, MI —
Shonda Buchanan, an award-winning poet, memoirist, and Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University, is a woman whose life and work are woven together with place, ancestry, and the power of storytelling.
Along her writing journey, Buchanan, a Kalamazoo Northside native, discovered personal intersections with the life, history, and artistry of one of America's well-known jazz and multi-genre musicians and Civil Rights leaders, Nina Simone.
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Casey GrootenShonda BuchananHaving returned to Southwest Michigan after living several years in Los Angeles and elsewhere., Buchanan's homecoming is both literal and literary.
Second Wave sat down recently with Buchanan to talk poetry, writing, and roots.
Buchanan’s thoughts on her heritage offer a glimpse into a life shaped by a commitment to preserving her family history. Her passion for research-driven art not only impacts her writing on topics of self but also extends to her many other projects, including her upcoming book "
The Lost Songs of Nina Simone" which will be released through
RIZE Press in May 2025.
Romance of the Northside
Buchanan was born in 1968 on Edward Street in Kalamazoo. Her mother and father met on the Northside, where she was raised.
“The house has been torn down since,” Buchanan says, but her love for the neighborhood is a factor in what drew her back to Kalamazoo. The neighborhood, once “the place for people who were up and coming back then,” held a profound significance for her family, which included her great-grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
“Having lived in and around the Northside until my high school years,” Buchanan says, “there is a romance to the Northside. The people who live there are validated.”
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Casey GrootenShonda BuchananDespite the neighborhood’s sometimes troubled reputation, it is where Buchanan settled into her roots and fell in love for the first time. “When we lived on Prouty, we made up dances to Luther Vandross in the streets,” Buchanan remembers, adding. “The values I grew up with started on the Northside.”
Those formative years deeply ingrained in her a sense of belonging and ancestral connection that became a defining aspect of her personality. As Buchanan puts it, she's “looking back to look forward.”
From the city to the country
By the time she was nine, Buchanan says she realized she loved writing. During her middle school years, her family moved from Van Buren County, which marked a critical transition in her life.
Throughout her growing up years, Buchanan says she spent a lot of time on her grandfather’s Paw Paw farm and looks back at those times with happiness. After her grandfather passed, the responsibility to look after the farm passed to Buchanan’s family, and they moved to Paw Paw.
Buchanan began attending Paw Paw Middle School, “as one of just five or six Black students” in a predominantly white school of nearly 1,000 where she says she experienced anxiety and prejudice.
She says she remembers vividly the “mean white kids” who mocked her by sniffing her coat and remarking, “It smells like wood smoke.” To a young girl who lived in a farmhouse, she says, the comment seemed silly.
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Casey GrootenShonda BuchananTo seek shelter from the bullying, Buchanan says she found a respite in reading. “The librarian knew that when Shonda came in, she needed to stay there and read,” Buchanan says. Louise Fitzhugh's "Harriet the Spy," a book about a young girl who keeps a notebook full of honest observations about the world around her, inspired Buchanan to start journaling. The family sold the farm in the early 1980s, but the years spent in the country left a deep impact on Buchanan’s sense of identity and resilience.
"It's time to be a writer in Kalamazoo."
Since the 1990s and until her return to Michigan, Buchanan lived in Playa del Rey, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, a place that she says opened up many opportunities for her writing and personal growth. But Buchanan describes the constant noise of her apartment complex, and how it made her long for peace.
In 2022, Buchanan could not resist the call of home. “It was time," she says. "I could feel ancestors, my mom — I could feel it in my bones.”
She began to plan to get back to Kalamazoo, wanting to return to the place where she was raised and also live near her family cemetery. “I need a quiet and a well-lit space to write,” says Buchanan who now lives in Almena Township and plans to stay.
Finding Nina Simone
Institutionalized racism is a recurring theme in Buchanan’s work. “It is pervasive in the very foundation of our country,” she says, citing the subjugation of Native peoples during colonization. Buchanan’s writing aims to identify places where communities can come together. Michigan, with its diverse population, serves as a microcosm for these explorations.
“We can come together as people,” Buchanan says.
Aside from her work as a freelance journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Indian Country Today, and The International Review of African American Art, Buchanan has published five books and multiple essays. Music and place are two of the many influences on Buchanan’s work, and the music and history of Nina Simone drew Buchanan in for years. “She was one of the first artists who inspired me with her music… and moments of insecurity.” Buchanan bought her first Nina Simone tape at Kalamazoo’s Crossroads Mall.
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Nina Simone, "The High Priestess of Soul'“(Simone) became someone who I looked up to as a difficult artist whose art was transcendent,” Buchanan says. Her connection to Simone, she says, goes beyond music; both women share Black and Indigenous heritage. Buchanan is a descendant of the Mende African nation of Sierra Leone and of the Coharie, Choctaw, and Eastern Band Cherokee North American nations. Buchanan says that her great-great-grandmother’s family owned hundreds of acres just west of Kalamazoo. “Where I live now is likely her land — my great-great-grandmother’s land.”
“Curiosity leads me to some very interesting places,” says Buchanan. To write her biography on Simone, Buchanan traveled across the United States and to Europe, retracing the artist’s steps. “My first feeling of writing about Nina was, I have to go where she was. I have to walk the same streets she walked,” Buchanan says.
Buchanan’s journey, for instance, led her to Paris, where she hoped to meet Simone’s former manager. Initially, she did not get a great feeling from the man, she says, describing him as “oily.” Yet, because of already knowing friends in that area of France, Buchanan decided to make the trip. While there, Buchanan learned that Simone did not do unpaid interviews. This, plus the demeanor of the “manager,” meant Buchanan was unable to interview Simone before her passing.
Buchanan's Simone biography has been a labor of love since 2017. During her tenure as a writer-in-residence at William and Mary College, Buchanan wrote poetry and also developed her book proposal. A year and a half ago, the project was picked up by a publisher.
Through her research, Buchanan says she met folks who provided invaluable insights into Nina Simone’s life. In North Carolina, she spoke with Simone’s cousin, who took her to the artist’s birthplace. While there, she observed the transformation of a bare-bones museum into a tribute worthy of Simone’s legacy. Simone’s cousin invited Buchanan to a pig fry, which she couldn’t attend, but she says the invitation made her feel like family.
Exploring the unexplored
Buchanan chose to write about aspects of Simone’s life that she had not seen widely explored. She shines a light on Simone’s loneliness as a child, a consequence of the constant pressure to perform. “The solitude and sweetness — those things she was,” Buchanan says.
“Nina is timeless,” Buchanan says, adding Simone’s story resonates today, particularly for women of color. “Everything that is happening right now with women of color — a lot of intersecting identities. To hold these and represent, Nina can be an example.”
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Yet, Simone’s story also prompts questions about the cost of activism and how women can reclaim their identities. Andy Stroud, Simone's second husband, distanced himself from his wife during her activism for Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. Buchanan reflects on these challenges as “a single woman, a mother, a grandmother,” aspiring to live a balanced life like her literary heroes Octavia Butler and Lucille Clifton.
“I want to be a healthy woman who lives a long life." Buchanan.
Though she never met Simone in person, the parallels in their lives and her extensive research make Buchanan uniquely positioned to write about the "High Priestess of Soul." She admits she's also struggled with whether she was up to the task.
“I doubt that all the time,” Buchanan says. “Nina’s looking over my shoulder saying, ‘You didn’t get that right.’ Her life is so rich and intriguing and hard.”
But like her musical and social justice mentor, Buchanan pushed beyond the resistance.
“(Simone) was always the one to stand up first."
More on Shonda Buchanan: She earned her BA and MA in English from Loyola Marymount University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. With over 20 years of teaching experience, she is currently a faculty member in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University.
She has also been involved in the African American Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University and the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Northridge. A recipient of numerous honors, Buchanan is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, an Oxfam Ambassador, and a fellow of PEN America’s Emerging Voices.