Although she didn’t intend to, jazz singer and composer Nnenna Freelon wrote her first book, set to be released Oct. 21. The memoir, Beneath the Skin of Sorrow: Improvisations on Loss, explores Freelon’s experience with grief through essays, poems, lyrics and recipes.

“I wasn’t even sure that it was a book at first, it was musings,” she said. “I wrote to keep myself afloat. I wrote to save my own life. I wrote to understand what I was feeling.”

Freelon said the memoir is not a linear story or a “how-to-do-grief” guide. Beneath the Skin of Sorrow contains four movements: “Around Midnight,” “Stolen Moments,” “A Love Supreme” and “Time Traveler.”

“Every story, every memory, every bit of it is about the possibilities of moving with your grief, dancing with it, even though you don’t know the steps. Engaging with it, leaning into it, even though you don’t want to,” she said.

The memoir extends the conversation Freelon began with her album Beneath the Skin, released in March 2025 — her first album featuring all original music. Freelon’s longtime friend Lois Deloatch described the songs as visual and intimate, yet accessible. She said they “have a different depth.”

“I don’t see it as something new or different. I see it as an unfolding and an excavation of what has already been there, and now she has the tools and the confidence to reveal these things through her art in ways that maybe she wasn’t ready or prepared to do previously,” Deloatch said.

Over the span of six months beginning in July 2019, Freelon’s husband, Phil; her sister, Debbie; and her dog, Basie, died. Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Freelon to sit alone with her grief.

“Two weeks turned to two months. Two months turned to two years, and in that space of deep, dense quiet, that’s where the book and the record were born, from the same creative breath,” she said.

Before releasing these projects, Freelon questioned the closeness she had created between truth and art: Is it OK to be this honest about your struggles? Is it OK to meet a room full of strangers with your bowl full of woe and joy? Will it be accepted? Will it be acknowledged?

She couldn’t walk onstage and pretend her life hadn’t been irrevocably changed. If she was going to continue making music after such profound loss, she decided, it would have to be rooted in authenticity.

“What you see is who she is,” Durham cultural advocate E’Vonne Coleman said. 

Coleman said she watched Freelon’s grief give rise to a new, stronger maturity — one visible in both her persona and her music.

“Nnenna has always had this cosmic view of the world and of our existence,” she said.

Freelon’s work often carries a cosmic reach, so it didn’t surprise Coleman when she and her late husband, Phil, bought the historic church on West Geer Street and named it NorthStar. Since 2017, NorthStar Church of the Arts has offered an inclusive space for creativity and community in Durham.

“It was a heck of a way to give back to this community, and we are forever grateful that they created this safe place,” Coleman said. 

Now, Freelon is channeling that same sense of cosmic connection into her latest collaboration, The Sistering, which celebrates sisterhood, artistry and the constellations female friendships form together. Deloatch, one of the four jazz artists involved, described it as “a love project.”

Lenora Zenzalai Helm and Kate McGarry complete the quartet, all of whom live within a 20-mile radius of Durham.

“We’re not the bright new young jazz singers. We’re all singers of a certain age, and the culture doesn’t really necessarily want to hear from the seasoned singer,” Freelon said. “So we are collaborating around ageism, around racism, around the distorted narrative that women don’t write music, women don’t arrange.”

Their project is rooted in a shared love of jazz — and of one another. The four women lift each other up rather than compete, Freelon said. Instead of feeling jealous of one another’s success, they celebrate it, on and off the stage. The group hopes to release their album in spring 2026. 

“How fabulous is it that we can all claim our own little constellation called The Sistering, and shine brighter because we shine together?” Freelon said.

On Thursday, Oct. 23, the Nasher Museum in Durham will host “An Evening with Nnenna Freelon: Conversation and Book Launch,” featuring an interview with Freelon and two Duke professors.

Freelon said her hope for both the album and the book is that people can see “the universal” in such personal stories. Deloatch said one thing she has always admired about Nnenna is that she’s community-rooted but universally relevant in what she cares about.

“I think these two new projects are evidence that lives well lived include grief and joy and pain and it’s the full range of emotion, a full range of experience,” Deloatch said.