Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943, and died in Blacksburg, Virginia, on December 9, 2024. She grew up between Knoxville and the Cincinnati area of Ohio, and at fifteen she returned to Knoxville to live with her grandparents and attend Austin High School. She was an avid reader. She grew up with her mother's library, which held Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, and she also read history, Charles Darwin and the development of the Constitution. She once expected to become a lawyer. She called herself a storyteller from a town of storytellers, and she named her grandmother and mother as the people she wrote for.

She entered Fisk University in 1960 as an early entrant and was expelled after a clash with the Dean of Women over leaving campus for Thanksgiving without permission. She worked at a Walgreens in Knoxville and helped care for her nephew. In 1964 a new Dean of Women urged her to come back. At Fisk she edited the student literary journal Élan, revived the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and published an essay in Negro Digest on gender questions in the Movement. She graduated with honors in history in 1967. Her grandmother, Louvenia Watson, died soon afterward, and she turned to poems to cope with the loss. Those poems went into Black Feeling, Black Talk. She took a semester at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work and briefly attended Columbia's School of the Arts. She privately published her first book in 1968 and became one of the foremost voices of the Black Arts Movement. One writer called her the Poet of the Black Revolution. Her early work was militant and carried the pressure of the civil rights and Black Power years.

Giovanni did not stay in one register. She began teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers in 1969 and had her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni, that year. In the 1970s she began writing children's literature and co-founded NikTom Ltd to publish Black women writers. She later taught at Queens College, Rutgers and Ohio State, and became a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, where she taught until she retired in September 2022. Her later work took up human relationships, hip hop, the spirituals, and history for children, including a book about Rosa Parks. Her anthologies include On My Journey Now, on African American history through the spirituals, and Grand Mother, which grew out of a writing workshop she led at a retirement home in Blacksburg. She recorded conversations with James Baldwin and Margaret Walker. After the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech she gave the convocation chant-poem, which was widely praised. She was proud of her Appalachian roots and worked to change how the world sees Appalachians and Affrilachians. Her honors included the Langston Hughes Medal, seven NAACP Image Awards, and a Grammy nomination for a poetry album.

Her method rests on a few steady habits. She asks of any claim, who said it and did it really happen, and then she asks what makes sense. She wanted people to stop making ideology out of history and to deal with what happened. She told students to trust their own voice, to ask what the number one best seller is as a way of dropping that chase, and to read the same book again and again. She insisted that politics is personal without being ideological. She said poets direct the heart and soul, and that poets tell the truth as they see it. She treated change as a requirement, since she said poems she wrote at 27 she would not write at 77, and she told students not to be afraid to contradict themselves. She treated her audience as free adults who could walk out the door, and she stated her beliefs plainly anyway. Her speeches, which carried a griot's rhythm and blunt Black vernacular, have been undervalued compared with her poems, a gap she shared with many Black women thinkers.