LaShonda Barnett

LaSHONDA K. BARNETT is the author of two short-story collections, the recipient of Standards Best of the Small Presses Award, Callaloo (New Victoria Publishers, 1999) and Broken Shoes For Walking: Stories of Everyday People. She received the College Language Association's Margaret Walker Award for Short Fiction and was the 2004 recipient of the New York Money for Women- Barbara Deming Artist Grant for Short Fiction.

A lover and scholar of black music, recently Barnett conducted over forty interviews with singer-songwriters and edited the first volume, I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007). Its companion volume, Let It Resound: Black Women Sounding Off On Their Music will appear in 2008. She has hosted her own jazz radio program on WBAI (99.5 FM, NYC); consulted and taught 'Women in Jazz' at New York City's Jazz at Lincoln Center; and lectured on the music both nationally and internationally in Austria, Brazil, France, Germany and South Africa.

She has held one-term appointments as guest faculty at the University of Richmond (women's literature) and Hampton University (African American literature) and a one-year visiting scholar post at Columbia University's Institute for Research in African American Studies (African American literature/Jazz Studies). From 2003-2006, she was a member of the Africana Studies and History faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, where she currently teaches short fiction at the Writing Institute.

LaShonda's roots began in the jazz-infused soil of Kansas City, Missouri, made the northerly jaunt to Park Forest, Illinois, where she grew up, and eventually spread to New York City, the metropolis she calls home and where she is completing her first novel, Jam, developing a (semi) mean right hook, and learning to speak portuguese.