Nikki Giovanni, a prominent figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s known as “the Princess of Black Poetry,” has died. She was 81.
Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, Giovanni’s life partner, was by her side when she died “peacefully” on Monday, her friend and author Renée Watson told The Times on Tuesday. Watson said that she had just been told for the third time that she has cancer.
“We will always feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin,” Giovanni’s cousin Allison “Pat” Ragan said in a family statement.
Watson, Kwame Alexander, and other close family and friends recently sat by Giovanni’s side and talked about “how much we learned about living from her, how lucky we have been to have Nikki guide us, teach us, and love us.”
In the statement, Alexander said, “We will always be grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us, to all her literary children across the world of writing.”
Giovanni, whose real name was Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr., wrote poetry that talked about Black identity and freedom. She was known for speaking out for causes and having a charismatic way of speaking.
She was friends with writers Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. She also made friends with Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali, all of whom were against the status quo.
“My dream was not to get published or even to be a writer. My dream was to find something no one else had thought of.” That is why I write poetry, I guess. Giovanni wrote on her website, “We put things together in ways that no one else does.”
Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943. She was named after her mother. She had a sister named Gary Ann. Later, her family moved north, and she spent most of her childhood in Cincinnati. In her writing, she talked about how rough that time was because her father beat her mother.
When Giovanni went back to Nashville in 1961, she studied history at Fisk, a historically Black college. She was admitted early, before she finished high school, because she had been reading a lot since she was a girl. The Associated Press said Giovanni was in charge of the school’s literary magazine and helped form the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
But she was kicked out of school after only one semester because she had a bad relationship with one of the deans because she was politically active and did not agree with the school’s strict rules and curfew. After three years, she went back to school and was given a new dean who agreed to erase her record.
After getting her degree in 1967, she moved back to Cincinnati and became the editor of a local art journal. There, she also put together the city’s first Black Arts Festival.
“Black Feeling Black Talk / Black Judgement,” her first book of poetry, came out on its own in 1968. Her poems came from how she felt about the deaths of her grandmother and the killings of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X.
“Reflections on April 4, 1968,” one of Giovanni’s early poems, was written on the anniversary of King’s death. It asked, “What can I, a poor Black woman, do to destroy America?” This is a question that is being asked in every Black heart, with the right changes.
The AP said that her other works, such as “A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why,” “Of Liberation,” and “A Litany for Peppe,” were violent calls to get rid of white power.
Besides writing poetry for adults, she also made two movies, 13 books of poetry for kids, and 10 recordings, one of which was nominated for a Grammy. A lot of times, she went on the PBS talk show “Soul.” When it came out in January 2023, “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” a documentary about her life, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. The movie uses vérité and old photos to show what is going on in Giovanni’s mind.
In her 2013 book “Chasing Utopia,” Giovanni wrote, “A poem is not so much read as navigated.” “From place to place, we find a new horizon, a change in light or laughter, or the thrill of something new that we had not seen before.” When read again and again, even well-known poems can make you feel like you are on a first date, meeting someone for the first time, or falling in love for the first time.
She taught at a few universities in the United States and as a guest lecturer in other countries before Virginia Fowler, an English professor, asked her to teach creative writing at Virginia Tech.
“We are very sad to hear about Nikki Giovanni’s death,” the university said on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday. “Nikki will be remembered not only as an acclaimed poet and activist but also for the legendary impact she made during her 35 years at Virginia Tech.”
That college had one of the deadliest shootings in U.S. history in 2007, when 32 people were killed and 17 were hurt on campus. The gunman, who was also killed, used to be a student of Giovanni’s. She had told school officials before about his bad behavior in her class. Giovanni, who used to teach creative writing, said that she showed the school’s dean some of his work and told him she could no longer teach him.
After the tragedy, she did a lot to bring people together and boost the spirits of the students who were very upset.
In 2007, she told The Times, “I could not let him fail my class.” She gave a rousing part of the convocation address at that school year’s graduation.
Then she said, “We will prevail! We will prevail! We will prevail! We are Virginia Tech.”
Fowler knows a lot about Giovanni’s work and legacy because she is married to her. An interview with the Fight and the Fiddle showed that Giovanni thought Fowler was a strong support and that she felt “so lucky to have found Ginny.”
Fowler said, “Her grandmother was the most important person to her.” “Their Cincinnati home was not happy because Nikki found out she had to leave or kill her dad.” She moved in with her grandmother. She asked to be allowed to stay.
For as long as Giovanni lived, she wrote. She did not follow the rules and had her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1969, when she was 25 years old. She did this because she “wanted to have a baby and I could afford to have a baby.”
It was her choice not to get married, and she told Ebony magazine that she “could afford not to get married.” In “Gemini,” her long autobiography published in 1971, she talked about her life as a young single mother, which was considered rude at the time.
A person who learned from Giovanni said, “Her life is the life of Black people.” “From the 1940s to now, she recorded it in every form of art: film, TV, and more.” Wilson is now a professor at Florida State University and has had poems published.
Wilson was a reporter and copy editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2007 when he made the case to write about Giovanni’s visit to the city. She stopped him in the middle of the interview and told him he should apply to Virginia Tech’s master’s program in creative writing.
“Nikki changed the course of my life.” “I am one of at least 25 famous writers with the same story,” he said. She helped us learn, was our friend, and took care of us when we needed a mother figure. She has been our teacher when we needed her to be, warning us about the bad things that can happen in publishing and in school.
People say that Giovanni’s work as a teacher helped bring up a new generation of Black writers.
Author of “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison had a party planned by Giovanni before he died in 2019. At the party, people read Morrison’s favorite parts of her work, which made her cry.
Giovanni helped other writers who were just starting out. She won seven NAACP awards and many other honors for her poetry.
“I think she is most proud of having made it possible for many writers to come after her.” Fowler said, “They were able to catch her because she had opened doors.” “She is kind and helps other people. She is helped other artists, which is not common.”
Sandy Banks, a columnist for The New York Times, talked to Giovanni in 2015, right after the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri.
„I am not a wise man. When Banks asked Giovanni for advice on how to help young writers, Giovanni said, “I do not know.” “Trust your own voice.” Also, keep looking into the things that interest you.
“I can only be a good Nikki.” “You can only be yourself,” she told him.
Joanne Gabbin, who has known Giovanni for a long time and is the executive director of Furious Flower, the first academic center for Black poetry in the country, thinks that Giovanni was most proud of her relationship with her grandmother. ”
Family is very important.” Gabin told The Times, “I think it all goes back to what her grandmother taught her, what her grandmother shared with her, and the values that her grandmother instilled in her.” “She had made a commitment to her grandmother that whatever she did, it would be excellent.”
Gabbin and Giovanni, who had been friends for more than 30 years, got to see the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. before it opened to the public in 2016.
Gabbin said that while Giovanni was touring the museum, she saw a “huge kind of a portrait” of herself in an exhibit. This portrait is known in history as a literary legend.
Fowler, Giovanni’s son Thomas, and her granddaughter Kai will miss her.