A01=Kevin Simmonds
African American
Author_Kevin Simmonds
Black aesthetic
black voices
Category=AVLF
Category=DCF
classical music
college experience
conservatory
creative nonfiction
discrimination
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Hurricane Katrina
LGBTIQ
lyric essay
memoir
Metropolitan Opera
music
opera
opera divas
poems about being a woman
poetry collection
queer
racism
sound studies
Southern
vocal studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780810143746
- Weight: 248g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jul 2021
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Leontyne Price remains one of the twentieth century's most revered opera singers and, notably, the first African American to achieve such international acclaim. In movements encompassing poetry and prose, writer and musician Kevin Simmonds explores Price as an icon, a diva, a woman, and a patriot-and himself as a fan, a budding singer, and a gay man-through passages that move polyphonically through the contested spaces of Black identity, Black sound, Black sensibility, and Black history.
Structured operatically into overture, acts, and postlude, The Monster I Am Today guides the reader through associative shifts from arias like 'weather events' and Price's forty-two-minute ovation to memories of Simmonds's coming of age in New Orleans. As he melds lyric forms with the biography of one of classical music's greatest virtuosos, Simmonds composes a duet that spotlights Price's profound influence on him as a person and an artist: 'That's how I hear: Her.'
Structured operatically into overture, acts, and postlude, The Monster I Am Today guides the reader through associative shifts from arias like 'weather events' and Price's forty-two-minute ovation to memories of Simmonds's coming of age in New Orleans. As he melds lyric forms with the biography of one of classical music's greatest virtuosos, Simmonds composes a duet that spotlights Price's profound influence on him as a person and an artist: 'That's how I hear: Her.'
Kevin Simmonds is a musician and writer originally from New Orleans. He studied music at Vanderbilt University and the University of South Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections, Mad for Meat and Bend to It, and the editor of Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof, a posthumously published collection by Carrie Allen McCray.
