Showing results by author "Kalisha Buckhanon" in All Categories

Set in New York in the '80s and '90s, Upstate tells the story of two young lovers, Antonio and Natasha, torn apart by tragedy and struggling to survive against all odds. When a horrific tragedy sends Antonio to jail, their worlds turn upside down.

While struggling with infertility, Candy and Frankie, a mixed-race couple living in Chicago, decide to adopt a black child. Despite objections from their wildly different families, who beg the couple to go the more "traditional route", Candy and Frankie schedule an appointment with the Department of Child Family Services in the hopes of finding not an infant, but a toddler - a child "no one else wants".

On a cold December evening, Autumn Spencer's twin sister Summer walks to the roof of their shared Harlem brownstone and is never seen again - the door to the roof is locked, and no footprints are found. Faced with authorities indifferent to another missing woman, Autumn must pursue answers on her own, all while grieving her mother's recent death. With her friends and neighbors, Autumn pretends to hold up through the crisis. She falls into an affair with Summer's boyfriend to cope with the disappearance of a woman they both loved.

Solemn Redvine is a precocious Mississippi girl who senses a nearby baby may be her half sibling - the outcome of her father's mistakes with a married woman who lives in their trailer park. After Solemn witnesses a man throwing the baby down a community well, she struggles to understand the event, leaving her forever changed. As Solemn finds refuge in fantasies of stardom as well as friendships with her brother's wife and a nearby girl, the ill-fated baby's doomed mother disappears without a trace.

Buckhanon takes us into the life of 15-year-old Shivana Montgomery, who believes all black women wind up the same: single and raising children alone, like her mother. Until the sudden visit of her free-spirited Aunt Jewel, Shivana spends her days desperately struggling to understand life and the growing pains of her environment. When she accidentally becomes pregnant by an older man and must decide what to do, she begins a journey towards adulthood with only a mysterious voice inside to guide her.

Tragedy and Victor Powell have moved to the desirable but dark Grayson Glens enclave of dream homes just outside of Chicago. Stressed urbanites, they’ve got to live large in real life to stay large online. With only a few blacks in their elite gated community, they settle in but never quite feel at home. Then, a missing young black woman floats up in the Grayson River. Is the spirit of the mysterious scarlet-lettered woman, Raven McCoy, haunting Grayson during the pandemic?