Kalisha Buckhanon is a writer, speaker and commentator creating stories and media about African-Americans, women, love and justice.

Kalisha is author of the novels Upstate, Conception, Solemn and Speaking of Summer: a book pick of Essence, O Magazine, TIME, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmo, Buzzfeed, Lit Hub and more. Her stories are published in Fiction, Fiction International, Oxford American, Black Renaissance Noire, Michigan Quarterly Review and more. Her essays appear in CrimeReads, The Root, The London Independent and more. She was also seen on ID, BET and TV-One true crime shows as an expert.

Kalisha’s debut novel Upstate introduced her in such media as People, Elle, Marie Claire, The Guardian/London Observer and Essence, as one of their "Three Writers to Watch." Chadwick Boseman co-narrates the audiobook and it won a Literary Fiction Audie Award. Terry McMillan gave Kalisha the only Young Author Award in her name for the novel. It is published in the UK and France, an American Library Association ALEX Award winner, a Hurston/Wright Foundation Debut Fiction Finalist, a New York Public Library’s Best Books for Teens and an inaugural “Literature for Justice” title for National Book Foundation.

Kalisha’s other honors include a Friends of American Writers Award for Conception, a Pushcart Prize nomination, a Zora Neale Hurston/Bessie Head Fiction Award at the Chicago Black Writers Conference, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and Phi Beta Kappa Society membership. She has master’s and bachelor’s degrees in English from University of Chicago, has a Creative Writing M.F.A. from The New School in New York City, and has taught preschoolers to seniors in numerous schools and programs across Chicago and New York City.