NEW YORK (AP) The poet, author, educator, and public speaker Nikki Giovanni passed away. She started off borrowing money to publish her first book and went on to become a literary sensation for decades, giving her honest and conversational opinions on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality. She was eighty-one.
According to a statement from friend and author Ren e Watson, Giovanni, the star of the award-winning 2023 documentary Going to Mars, passed away on Monday with her lifelong companion, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, by her side.
In a statement on behalf of the family, Giovanni’s cousin Allison (Pat) Ragan said, “We will always feel privileged to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin.”
Giovanni, a performer and confessor by birth, wrote over 25 books. Her work, readings, and other live appearances, as well as her years teaching at Virginia Tech and other universities, helped people get to know her well. She became so well-known that a 3,000-seat music hall at Lincoln Center was filled for a celebration of her 30th birthday. Poetry collections like Black Judgement and Black Feeling Black Talk sold thousands of copies and led to invites from The Tonight Show and other television shows.
She shared her story verbally, in writing, and in poetry. She recalled her early years in Tennessee and Ohio, supported the Black Power movement, talked about her struggles with lung cancer, honored heroes like Nina Simone and Angela Davis, and considered her own passions, including food, romance, family, and space travel—a task she felt Black women were especially qualified for, if only because of how much they had already survived. She also helped establish a publishing cooperative that championed the writings of Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker, among others, and edited Night Comes Softly, a landmark anthology of Black women poets.
She was referred to as The Princess of Black Poetry for a while.
In the introduction to her friend Barbara Crosby’s 2003 anthology of nonfiction prose, The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni, she was described as the most cowardly, bravest, least understanding, most sensitive, slowest to anger, most quixotic, lyingest, and most honest woman she knew. Loving her entails loving conflict and contradiction. To know her is to be certain that everything is life, yet to never fully comprehend.
Giovanni s admirers ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who name-checked her on the dance hit Square Biz, to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her Living Legends summit in 2005, when other guests of honor included Rosa Parks and Toni Morrison. Giovanni’s prose piece, Gemini, which chronicled her life, was a finalist for the 1973 National Book Award. Additionally, she was nominated for a Grammy for her spoken word album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.
She composed a poem on Barack Obama, the incoming president, in January 2009 at NPR’s request:
I will stroll the streets.
And knock on doors
Tell the people:
Your dreams, not mine
I’ll speak with the individuals.
I ll listen and learn
I’ll prepare the butter.
Then clean the churn
____
Giovanni had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1969. She never married the father, because, she told Ebony magazine, I didn t want to get married, and I could afford not to get married. Over the latter part of her life she lived with her partner, Virginia Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech.
She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was soon called Nikki by her older sister. She was 4 when her family moved to Ohio and eventually settled in the Black community of Lincoln Heights, outside of Cincinnati. She would travel often between Tennessee and Ohio, bound to her parents and to her maternal grandparents in her spiritual home in Knoxville.
As a girl, she read everything from history books to Ayn Rand and was accepted to Fisk University, the historically Black school in Nashville, after her junior year of high school. College was a time for achievement, and for trouble. Her grades were strong, she edited the Fisk literary magazine and helped start the campus branch of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. But she rebelled against school curfews and other rules and was kicked out for a time because her attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman, she later wrote. After the school changed the dean of women, Giovanni returned and graduated with honors in history in 1967.
Giovanni relied on support from friends to publish her debut collection, Black Poetry Black Talk, which came out in 1968, and in the same year she self-published Black Judgement. The radical Black Arts Movement was at its height and early Giovanni poems such as A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why, Of Liberation and A Litany for Peppe were militant calls to overthrow white power. ( The worst junkie or black businessman is more humane/than the best honkie ).
I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from? she wrote in a biographical sketch for Contemporary Writers. A poem has to say something. It has to make some sort of sense; be lyrical; to the point; and still able to be read by whatever reader is kind enough to pick up the book.
Her opposition to the political system moderated over time, although she never stopped advocating for change and self-empowerment, or remembering martyrs of the past. In 2020, she was featured in an ad for presidential candidate Joe Biden, in which she urged young people to vote because someone died for you to have the right to vote.
Her best known work came early in her career; the 1968 poem Nikki-Rosa. It was a declaration of her right to define herself, a warning to others (including obituary writers) against telling her story and a brief meditation on her poverty as a girl and the blessings, from holiday gatherings to bathing in one of those big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in, which transcended it.
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy
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