# The Curtis Rejection *A Biography of Nina Simone* — Legendary Biographies No. 093 - **Subject:** Eunice Kathleen Waymon (Nina Simone) - **Written by:** Adele Trahern - **Shelf:** Music / Jazz - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 184 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 184 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 184 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-046-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr (ISBN 979-8-90623-027-0) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/093-the-curtis-rejection.html ## About this book Saturday mornings in Tryon, North Carolina, a Black girl named Eunice Waymon climbed the steps to a white woman's parlor and learned Bach. She was six. She would practice eight hours a day for the next decade, certain she was being prepared for the concert stage. The Curtis Institute closed that door in a single afternoon. To pay her mother's rent, Eunice took a job at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City and was told, on her first night, that she would have to sing. She invented a name so her Methodist mother would not recognize it on a marquee. The voice that emerged — low, unhurried, classically schooled and gospel-fed — belonged to no genre then in existence. Adele Trahern follows Nina Simone from the chitlin circuit to Carnegie Hall, from Selma to Liberia to a small apartment in the south of France, tracing the architecture of a self-made artist and the forces working steadily to dismantle her. She writes with equal care about the hour in which she composed "Mississippi Goddam" and the years in which her illness and her rage made her dangerous to the people she loved most. What emerges is a portrait of a woman who refused, at every turn, to be smaller than her gift — and of an American century that punished her for it. ## Contents 1. Tryon 2. Mrs. Mazzy 3. Curtis 4. The Midtown Bar 5. Little Girl Blue 6. Carnegie Hall 7. Lorraine 8. Mississippi Goddam 9. Four Women 10. Andy 11. The Movement 12. The Wedding Ring 13. Barbados and Liberia 14. The Diagnosis 15. My Baby Just Cares for Me 16. Lisa 17. Carry-le-Rouet 18. The High Priestess ## Questions **Who is The Curtis Rejection about?** Eunice Kathleen Waymon (Nina Simone). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Curtis Rejection — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,513 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 184 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Adele Trahern writes from New Orleans about Southern voices the rest of the country has tended to misread. A former Times-Picayune reporter, she covered Louisiana politics for twelve years before turning to literary biography. Her background in investigative journalism shapes her approach to both non-fiction and prose. In her biography, The Curtis Rejection, and her novel, The Last Question, she focuses on the complex social realities of the American South. She lives in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans, where she spends her spare time volunteering at local archives and restoring her historic cottage.