Afiya, webmaster/designer of Wilesmag.com and her mother, Shonda Buchanan, travel writer and English professor, have enjoyed numerous mother-daughter trips, from California Wine Country to Mexico to Senegal. Stay tuned for their summer journeys to Hawaii, Montana, Los Padres National Forest in the California mountains, and the Kingdom of Tonga.

Shonda Buchanan

Former managing editor of Turning Point Magazine, Shonda Buchanan is an expert in the field of magazine, travel, entertainment and feature writing. Travel, writing and mother-daughter trips are among Shonda’s top passions. She has freelanced for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, The International Review of African American Art and Indian Country Today. Shonda has published in various anthologies including Strange Cargo: An Emerging Voices Anthology, Step into a World: A Global Anthology of New Black Literature, Arise! Magazine, Def Jam Poetry’s Bum Rush the Page, Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 and Rivendell. An award-winning poet, Shonda is editor of Voices from Leimert Park. A Sundance Institute Writing Arts fellow and a PEN Center Emerging Voices fellow, Shonda has driven cross country six times, visited and written about Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Currently, she teaches in the Department of English at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia.
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Afiya Owens-Khalfani

Site developer and manager for the dynamic online magazine for multicultural women, Wiles (Wilesmag.com), Afiya Owens-Khalfani uploads and formats all content, ads, videos, and articles. A brilliant graphic designer and marketer, she is the overall creator of synergy between content, design and image. In the last three years she designed four websites, maintaining three of those four. Graduate of the prestigious Parsons The New School for Design, she received her Bachelor of Business Administration in Design and Management. Her work experience includes an intense internship at BBDO New York, working on several major advertising campaigns, an internship with Egami Consulting Group, and as an office assistant with The New School University Housing. Afiya made her modeling debut in Fashion Week Fall 2011, and aims to stay close to the fashion world while designing state-of-the-art websites for her clients. Under the auspice of her company, AOK Design Solutions, Afiya’s portfolio includes sophisticated fliers, logos, CD covers, business cards, letterhead, brochures, book covers and book inserts. Afiya lives and works in Manhattan where she models, designs and creates.