Chisa Iwuagwu Lehane
Memoirist & Essayist
Drawing from decades of journals, letters, and family archives, I write about family estrangement, biracial identity, grief, mother-daughter relationships, and the ways children learn to survive the people they love. My work also explores sibling bonds, chosen family, and what we build when the families we are born into fail us.
Published Work & Performances
Featured Performance
Watch: I Buried Her While She Was Still Alive
Adapted from my memoir-in-progress: An eight minute live performance about family, grief, impossible choices, and the moment I understood that I had to let go of the mother who would never protect her children.
Performed July 31, 2026
Upcoming Performance
I Knew Everything When I Was 15: Excerpts from my teenage diary
The Memoir in Progress
Chisa Iwuagwu’s childhood begins inside a biracial family shaped by her Nigerian father, her white American mother, and the life they are building together in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When her father is murdered at six, that world is shattered.
Less than two years later, her mother remarries a controlling, deeply religious man who had once worked as a handyman for the Iwuagwu family. He increasingly cut Chisa and her brothers off from their Nigerian family and culture, eventually moving the family to a farm in rural Michigan.
As life at home becomes more isolated and frightening, Chisa records what is happening in childhood diaries. She and her brothers cling to one another, taking turns protecting and caring for each other.
One by one, her siblings begin running away, but Chisa stays, believing she is there to protect the mother she hopes will eventually wake up, choose her, and find a way back to the life they once had.
Decades later, Chisa returns to those journals, along with newspaper accounts of her father’s murder, and decades-old correspondence, to reconstruct the family that existed before her father’s death, understand what happened to him that night, and reckon with what followed.
The book traces her coming of age, her mother’s transformation, the unraveling of the story she inherited about her father, and the crisis that finally forces her to stop waiting for her mother to protect or choose her.
It is a story about what survives a family catastrophe, what children carry forward, and what it takes to build a family beyond the one that failed them.
Family Archives & Historical Documents
The memoir draws from decades of journals, family photographs, newspaper coverage, and correspondence between Nigeria and the United States.
July 1980
A letter my mother sent to my father while he was doing business in Nigeria, shown with a photograph of my parents.
Correspondence like this helped me reconstruct parts of his life and family that I had been too young to remember.
April 1985
The Grand Rapids Press
Coverage following my father’s murder, including the investigation into the man accused of killing him, Harry Bout, a family friend and business partner.
I was six years old.
January 1989
I had just turned ten when I wrote this entry about hearing my mother crying behind her bedroom door. My journals recorded both the frightening things I was trying to understand and the ordinary childhood details that existed right alongside them. I would eventually fill dozens of them, documenting events I wouldn't understand until much later.
Questions about upcoming releases, book clubs, or speaking engagements?
Drop me a note and I’ll personally respond.
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