CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/9/2024

New from DelMonico Books! 'This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance'

Featured photograph, by Bernard Gotfryd of Nina Simone with James Baldwin (1965), is from new release This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance, edited by Hilton Als and Rhea L. Combs and published to accompany the critically acclaimed exhibition currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. “The musician Nina Simone met James Baldwin through their mutual friend Lorraine Hansberry. Following the success of her groundbreaking play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Hansberry had committed herself to educating others she felt could contribute to raising awareness about the cause of equal rights. By introducing Simone to Baldwin and the poet Langston Hughes, Hansberry ensured her close friend would be embraced by other queer writers who understood something about difference. … Baldwin and Simone shared a great bond: the desire to marry anger to lyricism while refusing to separate the personal from the political.”