LaShonda Katrice Barnett was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1974, and grew up in Park Forest, Illinois. She is the author of the forthcoming debut novel Jam on the Vine (Grove Atlantic Inc., Feb. 2015) and a story collection (1999). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the College Language Association, among others. She is twice-nominated for the 2015 Pushcart prize.
In 2014, Barnett's short stories appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Guernica Magazine, New Orleans Review, SN Review, Juked, C4: Chamber Quarterly Literary Review, Gemini Magazine and elsewhere. The Appropriate Ones, her trilogy of full-length plays (Homewood, Menemsha and L'Echange), explores race within one interracial American family. She has held residences at the Noepe Center for Literary Arts-Martha’s Vineyard, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where she was a Tennessee Williams Fellow, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
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