Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony-only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, drunks, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance. Buchanan was raised as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything she (and the rest of her family) didn't know. Tracing the arduous migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe-a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or maimed-and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse. Ultimately, Buchanan's nomadic people endured a collective identity crisis after years of constantly straddling two, then three, races. The physical, spiritual, and emotional displacement of American Indians who met and married Mixed or Black slaves and indentured servants at America's early crossroads is where this powerful journey begins. Black Indian doesn't have answers, nor does it aim to represent every American's multi-ethnic experience. Instead, it digs as far down into this one family's history as it can go-sometimes, with a bit of discomfort. But every family has its own truth, and Buchanan's search for hers will resonate in anyone who has wondered ""maybe there's more than what I'm being told.

An anthology like this has been a long time coming. For the last fifteen years, every place we come together, whether it was The World Stage, or someones party, a birthday gathering, a childs naming ceremony, a funeral or a home-going, whether it was a cement corner or Fifth Street Dicks (Richard Fultons place) backed up by a jazz band, we have always brought words. We all knew this anthology needed to happen, but we were busy living and loving, making babies and building careers. And, of course, we were writing. Yet, we knew a renaissance was happening in Los Angeles, akin to the Harlem Renaissance. But we were caught up in it, shaking, grinding our pencils down, downing endless cups of coffee at a table outside Fifth Street, trying to find the words to say it precisely the way our heart was beating the sounds out. Blurbs: "There are convergences - spatial, political, cultural and artistic - that define a people's spirit and leave an indelible mark on the world's psyche. To say that this anthology is important or a landmark moment is to state the obvious. The work in this anthology weaves a tight rope around power and proves that the particular is the universal, the historical is the eternal and the ancestral soul is the dance of art. With the delicacy of an old school album, the music here is all flame and these poets are all fire people. Surrender to the sweet burn." - Chris Abani, author of The Virgin of Flames and GraceLand. "These Shaman Poets continue to renew and resurrect the power of verse, the sacredness of truth, and the eternal dance of words on pages and stages, as poets do everywhere, in righting and re-writing the world. If there were ever a time for such courageousword weavers, it's now." - Luis J. Rodriguez, acclaimed poet and founder/editor of Tia Chucha Press. About the Editor: Shonda Buchanan, poet and journalist, is a fellow of the Sundance Institute, PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices and the California Community Foundation. An assistant professor of English at Hampton University, Shonda is currently editing a novel, a memoir, a collection of poetry and a novella.