The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse

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 final 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."

Author: Kevin Simmonds
Publisher: Triquarterly Books
Published: 07/15/2021
Pages: 184
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9780810143746
ISBN10: 0810143747
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | African American & Black
- Poetry | LGBTQ+
- Literary Collections | Essays

About the Author
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 and Spirituality and Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof, a posthumously published collection by Carrie Allen McCray.