Writing the Heritage Poem - from $79
Culture and heritage can be found in our language, our food, our neighborhoods, within the rituals, religious practices or ceremonies your family kept, or in some cases, ignored. Heritage can be found in how you interact with your spouses, loved ones, at the workplace, and society, and what has been taught to you or what you teach your children.
Using the senses and sensory details, we will construct/write a heritage landscape poem, or poems, by unearthing and uncovering those memories hiding and locked in our everyday words, actions, interactions, our conversations and often our therapy sessions. Hopefully, by the end you’ll have a poem (or several) that sings of your heritage, your inheritance, and where you live or where you’re from; a poem(s) that represents you and/or a family member and/or your town, neighborhood or city/region.
Join us for this deep excavation of poetic language and memory!
Shonda Buchanan Biography (228 words)
Kalamazoo, Michigan native Shonda Buchanan is a twice Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Oxfam Ambassador, a Los Angeles Dept. of Cultural Affairs and California Arts Council Fellow, the founding Literary Editor of Harriet Tubman Press and Board President for Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, one of the oldest arts organization in the country. Author of Black Indian, chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Top 20 books to read to learn about institutional racism,” Shonda has freelanced for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today, Capital & Main, LA Progressive, Westways Magazine, Sisters of AARP, The International Review of African American Art, the Daily Press, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
A professor at Loyola Marymount University and in Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, Shonda’s forthcoming books are, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone and Children of the Mixed Blood Trail. Shonda Buchanan’s work focuses on the intersections of race, identity, migration, landscape and language with a mission to inspire, educate and heal. A descendant of African nations, the Coharie, Choctaw and Eastern Band Cherokee, and Europeans, Shonda writes on Chumash and Tongva lands in Los Angeles and in the Midwest on Ojibwa, (Anishinaabe), Ottawa and Potawatomi lands, yet she considers herself a citizen of the world. For more information, visit www.shondabuchanan.com.