Award-winning author, educator, and poet Shonda Buchanan’s new poetry collection, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone (RIZE Press, May 2025), explores the life of the incomprehensible Nina Simone, concert pianist, singer, and Civil Rights activist. With this book, Buchanan is declaring this “The Century of the Black Woman”, providing a glimpse into not only Simone’s life, but the lives of Black women in America, past and present, and their choices in a myopic, unforgiving country.
Buchanan explores Simone’s personal history, heritage, family, music, artistry, and trauma while revisiting many of the themes that run through Buchanan’s previous work: historical injustice, cultural representation, identity reclamation, and the interplay of spirit, survival, and creativity.
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The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is both an emotional and historical excavation of an artist’s life. It embodies the rich legacy of Simone, and her profound voice of love, rage, and liberation that moved a nation—and the world.
About the book
The Lost Songs of Nina Simone
By Shonda Buchanan
Running Wild Press
On-sale: May 26, 2025, Pages 119
ISBN: 9781960018984
About the author
Shonda Buchanan is the author of three collections of poetry: Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, Equipoise, and Poems from Goddess Country, as well as the award-winning memoir Black Indian, chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Top 20 books to read to learn about institutional racism.”
A professor at Western Michigan University, Loyola Marymount University, and Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, Shonda’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies and the Los Angeles Times, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today, Sisters of AARP, and others. Visit her official website at ShondaBuchanan.com
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING:
“Shonda Buchanan crystalizes [Nina Simone] as a rare amalgam: piano prodigy, sudden soul singer, freedom fighter, half-loved-lover, complex mother and still more.” -- Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture
“This work—part-biography, part-homage and elegy—is “a tangle of hard truths” where Simone opens anew to us and croons: “I will sing you the gift of me.” Her whole body, a country, its own America, spiraled web of misery, brilliance and solitary dreaming. We are beckoned back despite the difficulties, as Buchanan conjures love, anointing, and righteous fire in this new Black devotional. Don’t let me be misunderstood: The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is a history of us as well as a potent re-telling of an extraordinary life.” — Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up and Room Swept Home
“[T]he reader is invited to embark on a journey through poems of a fantastical and imaginative linguistic landscape, where Nina Simone’s childhood is portrayed against the backdrop of a nature-centric, magical realist narrative. The book culminates in a realistic and politically charged conclusion, all intertwined in histories of Africa, Ireland, and North America.” — Carolina Rivera Escamilla, author of In a Corner of Your Country
“We think we know Nina Simone and then we read Shonda Buchanan’s brilliant, carefully researched poems. Here are the lost songs of Nina as a girl and the songs of the women in her family. Here is Buchanan’s vision of how music entered Nina and changed the whole world.” — Renee Sims, author of Meet Behind Mars
“Nina Simone was known to put a spell on you. Now here comes Shonda Buchanan with poems that knits a scarf around the singer’s moods and spirit. Shonda begins with Nina’s ancestry and poems flow from the river of history, touching the banks along the way like Nina hitting keys on a piano. In The Lost Songs of Nina Simone Buchanan’s poems capture Simone’s blackness as well as the darkness she held within. This book is a meditation on her life; a Black woman poet’s detective work. Shonda Buchanan writes like a writer who has experienced a visitation from the Divine. Nina lives!” — E. Ethelbert Miller, writer and literary activist
See the press kit for more praise and information.
UPCOMING EVENTS
2/22 – Los Angeles, CA – Taper Forum, LA Public Library
2/23 – Los Angeles, CA – Stoneview Nature Center
2/25 – Pasadena, CA – Octavia’s Bookshelf
2/28 – Kalamazoo, MI – Kazoo Books
3/21 – Pittsburgh, PA – Sigma Tau Delta Convention
3/28 – Los Angeles, CA – AWP Writers Conference
4/24 – Kalamazoo, MI – Kalamazoo Poetry Festival
4/27 – Los Angeles, CA – L.A. Times Festival of Books
5/07 – Santa Clarita, CA – College of the Canyons, Day of Artivism
6/18 – Grand Rapids, MI – Schuler Books
For press inquiries, contact Alyssia Gonzalez at alyssia@osoliterary.com
nZinga Austin is also the Co-publisher of Our Black News Scoop and Southeast Queens Scoop. The documentary of about 1/2 hr long is getting rave reviews.
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