We are excited to welcome Shonda Buchanan to Octavia’s Bookshelf to discuss and sign her newest book, THE LOST SONGS OF NINA SIMONE!

Nina Simone’s ghost lives in these poems by award-winning author, Shonda Buchanan. Like the icon’s life and art, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is complex, daring, sensuous, hard and soft all at once.

Shonda Buchanan weaves a prism of language, sound and light around and through the life of concert pianist, singer and Civil Rights activist, the incomprehensible Nina Simone. With this book, Buchanan is declaring this The Century of the Black Woman, providing a realistic 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.