I think Billie Holiday, my muse, said, “Hey, you need to write about me.” I initially resisted because I was skeptical that perhaps teenagers would not know who she was and she’s been dead almost 50 years and perhaps she wouldn’t appeal to teenagers.
I went to a museum in Baltimore called Great Blacks in Wax and I was standing at the Billie Holiday Exhibit when an eighth grade walked up and said, “Ooh, Billie Holiday.” I looked at the girl and I asked her, “How old are you?” and she told me how old she was. I said, “And you know about Billie Holiday?”
She said, “Yeah, she could really sing.” I looked at Billie Holiday and I thought, “Okay. I’ll do it,” so that’s how the project came to be. Before writing a single word, I updated my collection of CDs. I’ve got lots of Billie Holiday on vinyl, but didn’t have much of her music on CDs so I updated my CD collection with a lot of her early recordings.
I listened to those recordings on my 100 mile commute to work every day for about two or three months. After my semester was over at Fayetteville State University, I got down to the business of reading some biographies of her and some oral histories and actually doing my research.
As I did that research, episodes of her life suggested musical backdrops for different things that happened to her and I decided that the poems that I wanted to write about Billie Holiday’s life would be titled after her songs. I had these song titles and I would read about an episode from her life, find a song title that was suggestive of that episode and then I wrote.
The poems poured out of me at an unprecedented pace — two to three a day, almost as if she were whispering her recollections or singing her recollections in my ear. By three months, I had written the entire collection. It’s about eighty poems. I’d never written anything that fast, not even a picture book. When I submitted it, something else amazing happened. Not 24 hours after submitting it, the editor called and said he wanted to acquire it. It’s almost as if Billie Holiday said, “I told you so. I told you so.”