Beneath the Skin of Sorrow

Nnenna Freelon is a celebrated jazz vocalist, composer, producer, and host of the award-winning podcast Great Grief with Nnenna Freelon. A seven-time Grammy award nominee, Freelon is a member of the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame. She has released over twelve solo albums, most recently, Beneath the Skin on Origin Records. Freelon lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Prelude Rubato First Movement. 'Round Midnight Second Movement. Stolen Moments Third Movement. A Love Supreme Fourth Movement. Time Traveler Cadenza Acknowledgments Biography

"Nnenna Freelon's resonant and skilled voice sings through this genre-bending, profoundly performative text. As she explores with passion and sorrow the multifaceted spaces of grief-a subject that becomes more and more a part of our national discourse-she has crafted a compelling, elegant, and extraordinary book." - Karla F. C. Holloway, author of Gone Missing in Harlem: A Novel "This deeply learned, uniquely beautiful book is full of brilliant insights into the deep philosophical and spiritual dimensions of grief and its relationship to creativity by one of our foremost artists. Nnenna Freelon's serious intellectual and artistic reflections search for the possibilities to be found in grief. Not in avoiding it, but in going there, living with and through, listening closely to it, and seeing anew through it." - Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays "Beneath the Skin of Sorrow is a sensuous, subliminal, and sacred siren that embraces an intimate void reminding us all that those silenced in death become defiant choruses in the forest. Nnenna Freelon has woven a rich forest for the wailing of losses texturized by remembrances of joy. This text is a tender requiem for all the portals closed and all the portals reopened inside of her journey with grief. She acknowledges that her history is now on fire but her illuminating heart invites us to this new interior that looms with raging unapologetic truth." - Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate.