Kevin Simmonds’s poems travel across his native United States and all over the world – from a Deep South spiritual’s lamentation, to gay men in a Bangkok sex club, to competitive hot-dog eating. With tender expansiveness that Jane Hirshfield says calls to mind “Whitman’s America’s future” and his “unquestionable sense of music” (Kwame Dawes), Simmonds readily turns to assess what causes others consternation, shame and fear: be it sexual abuse, racism, organised religion or sexual mutilation. In considering all our lives and circumstances, he meditates on the apple tree: ‘crouched down as if something brutal had happened / for the sweetness to come’.
Kevin Simmonds is a poet and musician, born in Chicago, Illinois. He trained as a classical singer but grew up in jazz, blues and gospel-drenched New Orleans, and his music has been performed throughout the US, the UK, the Caribbean and Japan. A frequent collaborator with Kwame Dawes, he has set several of his poems to music, including the children’s book I Saw Your Face and Hope, a meditation on HIV and AIDS in Jamaica commissioned by the Pulitzer Centre. His writing appears in the anthologies The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007) and Gathering Ground (2006). He now lives in San Francisco, California.
Kevin Simmonds is a poet and musician, born in Chicago, Illinois. He trained as a classical singer but grew up in jazz, blues and gospel-drenched New Orleans, and his music has been performed throughout the US, the UK, the Caribbean and Japan. A frequent collaborator with Kwame Dawes, he has set several of his poems to music, including the children’s book I Saw Your Face and Hope, a meditation on HIV and AIDS in Jamaica commissioned by the Pulitzer Centre. His writing appears in the anthologies The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007) and Gathering Ground (2006). He now lives in San Francisco, California.