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 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.