When Shonda Buchanan was in her twenties, she had a dream of writing a book of poems about singer, classical pianist, and Civil Rights activist Nina Simone, but the prospect of writing a book about someone else’s story was intimidating. At the time, she was in the beginning stages of crafting her own first memoir—published years later as Black Indian—and she was exploring the intergenerational resilience of women in her family. Simultaneously, she was also settling into her undergraduate program at Loyola Marymount University and trying to find her place in the world of professional writing while freelancing for both LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Back then, taking on the experience of someone else and being tasked with putting it to words felt far too daunting to even consider tackling.
Yet her growing interest in telling the iconic singer’s story persisted. “The poems kept coming to me,” Buchanan says. And the love of Simone had been there from the first time Buchanan heard one of her songs. “I discovered a cassette tape in my early 20s, and from the first moment I pressed play on my cassette player, I fell in love with her sultry, smoky voice.”
This May, Buchanan’s third collection of poetry will be published: The Lost Songs of Nina Simone. With these poems—some of which she workshopped while earning her MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch—she has finally fulfilled that dream from long ago.
Nurturing a Childhood Love of Poetry
Buchanan describes herself as having a “late start” to college: she began her undergraduate studies in her mid-twenties. But poetry was with her from the beginning. “Poetry was my first genre as a kid,” she says, “and I started writing real poetry at nine years old. I was always journaling, of course, and then at about 17 or 18, I said, ‘Why don’t I think about telling the story of my family?’” This laid the foundation for early drafts of her first memoir, Black Indian. This work celebrates the intergenerational resilience of women in her family and their navigation through the world as a bi-racial and tri-racial woman – Black, Indigenous, and white.
By the time Buchanan began her undergraduate studies, she was already well-versed in bringing creative projects and ideas to life, and she used her time in college and then graduate school to continue to refine Black Indian.
It was during a creative nonfiction class, in which Buchanan wrote a piece about Nina Simone, that her professor remarked she may have the beginnings of a book. “At the time, I was a bit intimidated,” Buchanan said, “because, you know, I was a young person. I wasn’t thinking about writing a biography or someone’s story. I was working on my own memoir. So I held onto it and said, ‘Okay, maybe later.’”
While Buchanan held onto her Nina Simone pieces, her career continued to grow and evolve with her: She obtained an MA in English from Loyola Marymount. She focused her thesis on Black pedagogy. She went on to teach at Hampton University and obtained a number of writing residency positions throughout the country. All the while, Buchanan continued writing the stories that felt meaningful and important to her own identity.
A Connection With Nina Simone
Much of Buchanan’s writing and approach to teaching reflect her identities as a Black Indigenous woman. In this way, her identity parallels that of Nina Simone, another creative, successful woman of color navigating a white supremacist society. “Of course I’m exploring her life as a Black woman in America,” Buchanan says. “Yet I’m also exploring her origin story, and the origin story of her ancestors in South and North Carolina…This book re-imagines her childhood, her young adulthood, and as a married woman to an abusive man. Because I love the genealogy trail, I’m also looking at how her African and Indigenous roots formed.”
Some readers may find the way the collection covers so much ground and so much of Simone’s biographical history overwhelming, but for Buchanan, these are the stories that need telling, and it made sense to tell them as poems. “It might be odd to think of a book of poetry as historical markers and containers,” she says, “because in our slim understanding from school, poems are about love and flowers and nature.” But, she continues, “Nina—her impoverished upbringing, her rich ancestry, her incendiary music and her groundbreaking life—deserved to be treated with the same kind of thoughtful care and research that we give any pivotal moment in history.”
Refining a Project Through MFA Workshops
Buchanan’s intentions to create a poetry collection on Simone were firm by the time she began her coursework in the Antioch MFA in Creative Writing. She already had drafts of multiple poems, which would one day be published in the collection. She workshopped them through multiple terms in the program. Buchanan describes The Lost Songs of Nina Simone as a “ten-year book”—a type of ongoing project which has continued to exist and take shape amongst her other literary and teaching pursuits. The project began long before Buchanan’s time as an Antioch student; it evolved and sharpened in its poetic and literary intentionality during the program, and today it is finally about to be published.
Buchanan’s time at Antioch was also instrumental in shaping her future as a writer. “I had a different experience going into the program and just kinda saying, ‘let’s do this for me to work on my craft’. And then asking myself, ‘What are you going to write? What are you going to finish?” She was fully prepared for an intense time devoted to writing and honing her poetic skills, but Buchanan was pleasantly surprised to also find mentorship. “What I didn’t know,” she says, “is that low-residency programs and MFA programs introduced you to award-winning published authors. They were teaching your classes. So in terms of establishing myself as a published writer, Antioch was very instrumental.” This connection to Antioch and other working writers continues to ring true for Buchanan. This past fall, she was one of six alumni poets invited to read at the “Poetry is Democracy” event, part of the Antioch Works for Democracy initiative.
At the same time, Buchanan also had to hold the challenges of navigating academia as a Black Indigenous woman. Before pursuing her MFA, Buchanan was all too familiar with stories of racially-charged critiques others were experiencing across academia. She says, “I started hearing the stories of how they either dropped out of a grad program because someone said, ‘Your dialect doesn’t sound real, or why are you writing in such a Toni Morrison vein?’” Hearing such stories and having her own experiences of racism throughout her personal and professional life propelled Buchanan forward in her commitment to Black and Indigenous storytelling. She says, “As a writer of color, we occupy this double role—we speak for our experience, but also for those who don’t share it but still want to learn.”
Buchanan’s role as a storyteller is one of education and engagement. Her professional life extends well beyond writing, and she sees education and writing as intertwined entities. “I can teach about the mixed-race scholarship from the Afro-Indigenous perspective… about the mulatto, the free person of color, which is something we don’t get taught in high school,” she says.
Grounded in Creative Community
Today, Buchanan splits her time between her hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Los Angeles. When not teaching in Los Angeles or writing her latest collection, Buchanan is actively involved with serving on the boards of the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival and the Kalamazoo Arts Council. For Buchanan, writing has never been about just personal success. Rather, it is an opportunity to support others through writing and advocacy. She says, “Being a good literary citizen means giving back to those people who really supported you first.”
Writing The Lost Songs of Nina Simone was both an act of love and responsibility for Buchanan, much like how she approaches research and storytelling. “I think it’s really important for us to think about, as writers who are wanting to tell other people’s stories, to be easy on yourself when you’re trying to interpret a thing that you didn’t experience or see or live,” she says. “But then also, you do have a bit of responsibility to do some research… so that you know you’re telling a true story.”
Buchanan often felt Simone’s presence guiding her during the writing process, and even challenging her to meet a higher standard. “There’s one poem in the book where I say she’s staring over my shoulder, saying, that’s not right. And so I was always trying to write to the level that she would approve of.” The final collection is one that Buchanan hopes makes Simone’s fans and her legacy proud. “This book of poetry is the first time we see her life from beginning to end, looking at these particular crossroads,” Buchanan says. “This is my love letter to her. For her. For her art in my life.”
