Sounds of the rushing river blended with the distant moos of free-range cows who shared the land with us—me and five other artists at a Wyoming residency. My mission was to finish the first draft of ekphrastic poems about my muse, Nina Simone, classical pianist, singer, composer, and civil rights activist.
Where to find Nina Simone in this landscape of rolling hills and cow herds?
The land.
Born Eunice Waymon on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina, a little country town in the middle South, she was a product of her tiny houses—one now designated a historic landmark—the people, her Methodist mother’s church, and her father’s trickster ways. Simone was as much a child imprinted by the gospel music she learned starting at age three as she was a daughter of the dank humidity seeping from the hot, damp earth where her great-grandparents were enslaved. I’d find the answer to my question in what came before Nina. Her ancestors and the past, and move on from there. This approach to writing about Simone opened up an entirely new cavern for me.