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), and recently completed her debut novel, Jam! (forth). For short fiction she received the College Language Association's Margaret Walker Award (2000) and New York's Barbara Deming Foundation's Artist Grant (2004). 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 conducted over forty 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, 2013). 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. Since 1998, Barnett has taught the history, literature and music of the African Diaspora at the University of Richmond, Hampton University, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College and CUNY. She divides her time between home on Manhattan's upper west side and Providence, where she is Visiting Assistant Professor in Ethnic Studies at Brown University (CSREA) researching her next historical novel on 18th-century African American seafaring men.
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