Nationwide — Award-winning writer, 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 guide, Buchanan is declaring this “The Century of the Black Lady”, offering a glimpse into not solely Simone’s life, however the lives of Black girls in America, previous and current, and their decisions 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 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.
In regards to the bookThe Misplaced Songs of Nina SimoneBy Shonda BuchananRunning Wild PressOn-sale: Might 26, 2025, Pages 119ISBN: 9781960018984
In regards to the writer
Shonda Buchanan is the writer 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 Occasions, AWP’s The Author’s Chronicle, Indian Nation Immediately, 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, writer 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 present of me.” Her complete 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 rare life.” — Remica Bingham-Risher, writer 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 poems of a fantastical and imaginative linguistic panorama, the place Nina Simone’s childhood is portrayed towards the backdrop of a nature-centric, magical realist narrative. The guide culminates in a sensible and politically charged conclusion, all intertwined in histories of Africa, Eire, and North America.” — Carolina Rivera Escamilla, writer of In a Nook of Your Nation
“We predict we all know Nina Simone after which we learn Shonda Buchanan’s good, fastidiously 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 altered the entire world.” — Renee Sims, writer of Meet Behind Mars
“Nina Simone was recognized 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 movement 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 guide is a meditation on her life; a Black girl 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 Library2/23 – Los Angeles, CA – Stoneview Nature Center2/25 – Pasadena, CA – Octavia’s Bookshelf2/28 – Kalamazoo, MI – Kazoo Books3/21 – Pittsburgh, PA – Sigma Tau Delta Convention3/28 – Los Angeles, CA – AWP Writers Conference4/24 – Kalamazoo, MI – Kalamazoo Poetry Festival4/27 – Los Angeles, CA – L.A. Occasions Competition of Books5/07 – Santa Clarita, CA – Faculty of the Canyons, Day of Artivism6/18 – Grand Rapids, MI – Schuler Books
For press inquiries, contact Alyssia Gonzalez at alyssia@osoliterary.com
