Michael David Buchanan
Michael David Buchanan, born in Nurnberg, Germany, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, presently lives in Alpharetta. He attended Georgia Tech and Georgia State University where he received a Masters in mathematics. His interests include diving for artifacts and fossils in rivers of the Southeast, reef diving in the Caribbean and photography. A high school and college teacher for over thirty years, and a high school basketball coach for nineteen years, Michael Buchanan has been recognized for his creative teaching style; both USA Today and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have featured Buchanan in their publications. For eight years, he organized adventure trips for students to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, the jungles of Costa Rica and the reefs of Honduras. He is a frequent speaker at nearby schools on the topics of writing and diving.
Buchanan has been nominated twice for the Disney Award in Creative Teaching, selected as Teacher of the Year for nationally recognized Chattahoochee High School (2001), and is nominated yearly for Who’s Who of American Teachers. Buchanan has been published in O Georgia!, an anthology of Georgia writers, in artifact and treasure magazines, and in “Reflections,” a monthly magazine for the Georgia Council of Math Teachers. Micah’s Child is his first collaborative work. He is currently working with Lang on the sequel to Micah’s Child; Cry of the Quetzal, a historical romance about the Quakers who fled from Alabama to Costa Rica; and The Fat Boy Chronicles, a fictionalized journal of an obese teenager.
A regular speaker on Celebrity Cruises, Buchanan has been invited to speak at literary and educational forums throughout the South. He also volunteers to help with many of the Lost Boys of Sudan living in Atlanta. Over the years, Buchanan has been called the Patch Adams of high school teaching. Buchanan’s philosophy is shown best by the words from Thomas Carlyle, “When you go as far as you can see, then you can see further.”
Buchanan’s screenplay Treasure of the Four Lions is now in preproduction with Riverwood Studios in Atlanta. He also collaborated with Lang on the screenplay for Ryan’s Heart, the true story of Ryan Boslet, a high school football player who died from HCM, a detectable heart condition. Buchanan is a persistent student of writing and always eager to accept another challenge.