Instructor Shonda Buchanan is a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and PEN America Mentor. An Associate Professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University and Alma College's MFA Program in Creative Writing, Shonda is editor of two poetry anthologies, author of three collections of poetry, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, Who's Afraid of Black Indians?, Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country, as well as the award-winning memoir, Black Indian, chosen by PBS NewsHour as a "Top 20 books to read to learn about institutional racism." Shonda has published in The Mississippi Review, TAB Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, LA Times Magazine, AWP's The Writer's Chronicle, Indian Country Today, Red Ink Journal, LA Parents Magazine and freelanced for The International Review of African American Art, Westways, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Daily Press and Sisters of AARP. Shonda's forthcoming essay collection, Children of the Mixed Blood Trail, explores mixed-race migration in North America. A descendant of the African Mende nation of Sierra Leone, and in North America, the Coharie, Choctaw and Eastern Band Cherokee, and Europeans, Shonda writes on Chumash/Tongva lands in Los Angeles and in the Midwest on Ojibwe/Anishinaabe, Ottawa and Potawatomi lands. Shonda has taught creative writing, research and BIPOC/American literature for the past 27 years.