Simone Minor is always on the move. We began our interview in my kitchen after an admittedly subpar foray into baking and ended it over the phone three days later. Simone assures me that she’ll bake me cupcakes more up to her standards another time. As she treks across grounds from New Dorms to Shannon Library during our phone call, Simone greets the many friends and classmates who call out to her, pausing the interview to make sure none of them feel slighted.
I’m not offended. Simone has the effortless ability to make you feel like you’re the only person in the room, even when she’s holding court with an entire community. She could be reading an ingredients list and I’d still hang on to every word. Multiple times throughout the interview, I use the word profound, though Simone always tells me I’m being too kind.
“I want to be felt unapologetically, not diluted, in high concentration,” Simone says. “I believe in compromise, but I also believe in change and I want to be an actor of change in whatever I do.”
Simone is a third year double majoring in Global Public Health and Sociology. She’s also an RA, an OAAA peer advisor, and an Iris Magazine intern. And that’s just scratching the surface of her very impressive resume, but let me make one thing clear. Simone’s not in it for the accolades.
When I ask her about her pre-med aspirations and how they intersect with her more artistic side, she tells me that the reality is often frustrating.
“The reasons I want to be a medical professional are more aligned with the creative and artistic part of myself and less aligned with some sort of mastery of scientific skill or extreme interest in scientific thought.”
Simone’s true motivation is centered in a holistic view of what it means to be human. “When it comes to studying to be a doctor, I’m really interested in the thought and practice of embodiment, which is a really big thing in anthropology. [It] is essentially the notion that your patient in the body is way more than any diagnosis. I find it particularly interesting, as a Black woman, whose pain historically has not been addressed and acknowledged, how all of the things that you’ve been through reveal themselves in the body and on the body.”
This focus on the body is also reflected in Simone’s artwork. Through creating poetry and ceramics during the pandemic, Simone found an outlet to work through the parts of herself that she didn’t always have the space to listen to. “[Ceramics] particularly represented my coming of age story as a Black woman. With ceramics you never know if it’s going to turn out perfect. It could be perfect when you make it and you put it in the kiln and it just shatters.”
And perfection, Simone points out, isn’t the point. “One of my favorite types of ceramics is kintsugi, which is a Japanese artform, which is putting together broken ceramics with gold and that really resonates with me because I feel like a lot of my art is imperfectly perfect, but perfect for me.”
In addition to her art, Simone is always focused on people. Whether she’s walking to the library for a late night study session, sculpting her next piece (out of clay or language), or working on anthropological research that centers Black women, the people always take precedence over the medium. Connection is the point.
Because of her human-centered approach, Simone sometimes runs into conflicts with the often depersonalized, detached side of medicine. “I truly care about the patient as a person and not as a scientific inquiry. It can be frustrating when you feel like the world of medicine doesn’t value that type of thought and it’s not seen as normal.”
She chuckles, “I don’t think this is what the average pre-med is thinking about, but I think that’s also why I’ve chosen the path that I have. I sometimes get frustrated because I feel the artistry in my bones innately like it's a part of me, but that isn’t seen as part of the anatomy.”
The artistry Simone feels in her bones isn't purely metaphorical. When I press her about her life’s work, Simone says that she doesn’t want to be remembered, as much as she wants to be felt.
“As a Black woman sometimes I feel like I go about the world and experience things and I can almost feel my ancestors weighing on my heart, weighing on my mind, weighing on my shoulders. I also think in a systemic way sometimes you can almost feel those that have paved the way for it to be this way. Even if you don’t have a name [for them] or fully understand it.”
Simone is clear that she’s not after glory, but progress. “I don’t want to be known for being me. I don’t care about people knowing my name. If I’m going to be a part of something, I feel responsible. I can’t let an unjust, unfair, inequitable system go on. I don’t want to associate myself with anything or anyone that doesn’t value people first. Ultimately, I hope that some portion of what I do is left behind, built upon and fortified. I keep that in mind in what I do and how I navigate.”
So, when it comes to her life’s work, Simone reminds me that there isn’t one right path and that life isn’t a binary. “It might happen through my artwork or my writing, or through being that representation or having that hard conversation or doing that difficult, under-funded research. I see myself making change in a lot of different ways. I can be connected and multifaceted and that’s what makes me me.”
Though we may have to wait a couple of years to read Simone’s first poetry collection or see her research in a published journal, she is undoubtedly an agent of change already. Multifaceted and multitalented, Simone is reshaping what it means to be an artist.
Don’t worry, she assures me. “My body of work is coming over time.”
To read Simone's feature on Cassie, see "Pieces of Cassie Baked to Imperfection"
