Nationwide — Award-winning creator, educator, and poet Shonda Buchanan’s new poetry assortment, The Misplaced Songs of Nina Simone (RIZE Press, Might 2025), explores the lifetime of the incomprehensible Nina Simone, live performance pianist, singer, and Civil Rights activist. With this e-book, Buchanan is declaring this “The Century of the Black Girl”, offering a glimpse into not solely Simone’s life, however the lives of Black ladies in America, previous and current, and their selections in a myopic, unforgiving nation.
Buchanan explores Simone’s private historical past, heritage, household, music, artistry, and trauma whereas revisiting lots of the themes that run by means of Buchanan’s earlier work: historic injustice, cultural illustration, id reclamation, and the interaction of spirit, survival, and creativity.
The Misplaced Songs of Nina Simone is each an emotional and historic excavation of an artist’s life. It embodies the wealthy legacy of Simone, and her profound voice of affection, rage, and liberation that moved a nation—and the world.
Concerning the e-book
The Misplaced Songs of Nina Simone
By Shonda Buchanan
Working Wild Press
On-sale: Might 26, 2025, Pages 119
ISBN: 9781960018984
Concerning the creator
Shonda Buchanan is the creator of three collections of poetry: Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, Equipoise, and Poems from Goddess Nation, in addition to the award-winning memoir Black Indian, chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Prime 20 books to learn to find out about institutional racism.”
A professor at Western Michigan College, Loyola Marymount College, and Alma Faculty’s MFA Program in Artistic Writing, Shonda’s work has appeared in quite a few anthologies and the Los Angeles Instances, AWP’s The Author’s Chronicle, Indian Nation At the moment, Sisters of AARP, and others. Go to her official web site at ShondaBuchanan.com
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING:
“Shonda Buchanan crystalizes [Nina Simone] as a uncommon amalgam: piano prodigy, sudden soul singer, freedom fighter, half-loved-lover, complicated mom and nonetheless extra.” — Remica Bingham-Risher, creator of Soul Tradition
“This work—part-biography, part-homage and elegy—is “a tangle of arduous truths” the place Simone opens anew to us and croons: “I’ll sing you the reward of me.” Her entire physique, a rustic, its personal America, spiraled net of distress, brilliance and solitary dreaming. We’re beckoned again regardless of the difficulties, as Buchanan conjures love, anointing, and righteous fireplace on this new Black devotional. Don’t let me be misunderstood: The Misplaced Songs of Nina Simone is a historical past of us in addition to a potent re-telling of a unprecedented life.” — Remica Bingham-Risher, creator of Soul Tradition: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up and Room Swept House
“[T]he reader is invited to embark on a journey by means of poems of a fantastical and imaginative linguistic panorama, the place Nina Simone’s childhood is portrayed in opposition to the backdrop of a nature-centric, magical realist narrative. The e-book culminates in a sensible and politically charged conclusion, all intertwined in histories of Africa, Eire, and North America.” — Carolina Rivera Escamilla, creator of In a Nook of Your Nation
“We expect we all know Nina Simone after which we learn Shonda Buchanan’s good, rigorously researched poems. Listed here are the misplaced songs of Nina as a woman and the songs of the ladies in her household. Right here is Buchanan’s imaginative and prescient of how music entered Nina and adjusted the entire world.” — Renee Sims, creator of Meet Behind Mars
“Nina Simone was identified to place a spell on you. Now right here comes Shonda Buchanan with poems that knits a shawl across the singer’s moods and spirit. Shonda begins with Nina’s ancestry and poems move from the river of historical past, touching the banks alongside the best way like Nina hitting keys on a piano. In The Misplaced Songs of Nina Simone Buchanan’s poems seize Simone’s blackness in addition to the darkness she held inside. This e-book is a meditation on her life; a Black lady poet’s detective work. Shonda Buchanan writes like a author who has skilled a visitation from the Divine. Nina lives!” — E. Ethelbert Miller, author and literary activist
See the press package for extra reward and data.
UPCOMING EVENTS
2/22 – Los Angeles, CA – Taper Discussion board, LA Public Library
2/23 – Los Angeles, CA – Stoneview Nature Middle
2/25 – Pasadena, CA – Octavia’s Bookshelf
2/28 – Kalamazoo, MI – Kazoo Books
3/21 – Pittsburgh, PA – Sigma Tau Delta Conference
3/28 – Los Angeles, CA – AWP Writers Convention
4/24 – Kalamazoo, MI – Kalamazoo Poetry Pageant
4/27 – Los Angeles, CA – L.A. Instances Pageant of Books
5/07 – Santa Clarita, CA – Faculty of the Canyons, Day of Artivism
6/18 – Grand Rapids, MI – Schuler Books
For press inquiries, contact Alyssia Gonzalez at [email protected]
