LaSHONDA KATRICE BARNETT was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1974, and grew up in Park Forest, Illinois. She is the author of a story collection Callaloo, (1999). For short fiction she received the College Language Association's Margaret Walker Award and New York's Barbara Deming Foundation's Artist Grant. Recent awards for writing and historical fiction research include the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities & National Endowment for the Humanities Grant #45.12 (2011); Mystic Seaport's Munson Institute of Maritime Culture Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship (2010); Sewanee Writers Conference Tennessee Williams Scholarship (2009) and a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
A lover and scholar of music of the African diaspora and an avid interviewer, Barnett has conducted over one hundred interviews with women musicians and edited the volumes, I GOT THUNDER: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft (2007) and OFF THE RECORD: Conversations With African American & Brazilian Women Musicians, (forthcoming, Rowman & Littlefield, Spring 2014). She is currently interviewing for her third music book, DROP THE MIC: Women Hip Hop & Neo Soul Artists Sound Off On Creativity & Commerce (forthcoming, Wesleyan University Press 2015/Music-Interview Series edited by Daniel Cavicchi). 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.
A graduate of the University of Missouri, she received an M.A. in Women's History from Sarah Lawrence College and the Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. She has taught the history, literature and music of the African Diaspora at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Hunter College and Brown University.
Currently completing a novel on 18th-century African American seafaring men, Barnett lives and writes full time at home on Manhattan's upper west side.
Jam On The Vine, her debut novel in which a woman launches a black newspaper in the Jim Crow Midwest, is forthcoming with Grove/Atlantic (Elisabeth Schmitz, VP/Executive editor ).
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