Nikki Giovanni, a poet of rage and revolution as well as love and longing, who emerged as a fiery voice of Black liberation in the 1960s before honing a more tender, meditative style in best-selling books for children and adults, died Dec. 9 at a hospital in Blacksburg, Virginia. She was 81.
The cause was cancer, according to a family statement shared by her friend Kwame Alexander, a poet and author. Ms. Giovanni had battled cancer twice already, according to the statement, and was still giving readings and performances as recently as last month, when she collaborated with saxophonist Javon Jackson for an event at the Louis Armstrong House in Queens.
Across more than five decades and three dozen books, Ms. Giovanni wrote poetry and prose that bridged the public and private spheres, celebrating Black identity, attacking white supremacy and extolling ordinary pleasures such as artichoke soup and a mother’s warm embrace. Her work often paid homage to earlier Black artists and activists, and made her an elder stateswoman among African American poets.
“Me, I only wanted to be a voice,” she wrote in “I Am in Mexico,” a prose poem from her 2007 collection “Acolytes.” “Coming as I do from a voiceless people, a people who were denied freedom, a language, an education; coming as I do from a people who had only song with which to tell our story and a poem with which to dream … I wanted to be a voice.”
That voice was by turns harsh and tender, militant and jubilant. Nicknamed “the Princess of Black Poetry,” Ms. Giovanni was first known as a leader of the Black Arts Movement, which emphasized African American empowerment and self-determination, applying the political message of Black Power to works of art and literature.
At age 24, the day after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she wrote “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” which begins: “What can I, a poor Black woman, do to destroy America? This / is a question, with appropriate variations, being asked in every / Black heart.” Around that same time, she composed lines in which she appeared to contemplate giving up poetry altogether: “maybe i shouldn’t write / at all / but clean my gun / and check my kerosene supply / perhaps these are not poetic / times / at all.”
In other early verses, she luxuriated in the memory of childhood afternoons listening to gospel music and eating “fresh corn / from daddy’s garden.” She sang of “beautiful beautiful beautiful / black men with outasight afros” and joyfully linked herself to ancient myth and Egyptian civilization: “My oldest daughter is nefertiti / the tears from my birth pains / created the nile / I am a beautiful woman.”
Ms. Giovanni’s first poetry collections became staples of Black-owned bookshops such as Drum and Spear in Washington, and in 1971 she rose to national prominence when she released a spoken-word album with a gospel choir. Titled “The Truth Is on Its Way,” the record “made poetry meaningful to many people who previously dismissed it as nonsensical and irrelevant,” Ebony magazine reported. “Nikki, the poet, has become a personality, a star.”
For a time she was a rare poet-celebrity, chatting with guest host Flip Wilson on “The Tonight Show” and appearing on television shows such as “Soul!” to interview James Baldwin, Lena Horne and Muhammad Ali about Black art and identity. In 1973, she was a National Book Award finalist for “Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet.”
Ms. Giovanni with her son Thomas in their New York apartment in 1972.
Ms. Giovanni celebrated her 30th birthday that year by performing at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan, accompanied by the New York Community Choir and singers Melba Moore and Wilson Pickett. Diminutive but energetic, at 5-foot-2 and 100 pounds, she had shed her revolutionary persona and said she simply wanted to “share some joy” with the sold-out crowd.
“I’m not downgrading anger, but how long can you stay angry?” she told the New York Times before the concert. “One winds down. I never wanted to repeat anything in my life — not what I was, at 20 … nor what I am now when I’m 40. We’ve touched on every sore that anybody in the country ever had and think we should do some healing.”
Still, she remained blunt and forthright in her political opinions for decades, declaring amid the coronavirus pandemic that she was disappointed President Donald Trump had not died of covid-19, saying he was “crazy and evil.” In 2020, she read a poem in a campaign ad for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and published a new collection, “Make Me Rain,” that included pieces inspired by the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
“She has always been deeply invested in the Black liberation struggle, and since the Black liberation struggle remains ongoing and necessary, she’s an elder now of that movement,” poet Fred Moten told the Times in 2020. “It’s not just that she’s managed to stay relevant, it’s that the need for her is still here.”
If there was a need for poetry that galvanized and inspired, there was also a demand for poetry that comforted and unified — and Ms. Giovanni provided on both counts. A longtime English professor at Virginia Tech, she spoke at a memorial convocation in April 2007, the day after Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old undergraduate, massacred 32 students and teachers before killing himself.
Ms. Giovanni remembered Cho from a seminar she had taught in 2005 and, after learning a mass shooting had unfolded, said she could immediately name the shooter. She had removed Cho from her class after he wrote what she described as “really creepy things” and intimidated other students, taking photos of them with his cellphone camera.
Asked by the university president to deliver closing remarks at the convocation, she composed a 258-word prose poem — “We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be” — that concluded with a line of hope and defiance: “We are Virginia Tech.”
The audience, which included President George W. Bush, responded with a standing ovation that lasted more than 90 seconds.
“I was thrilled that the poem resonated,” Ms. Giovanni later told the Miami Herald. “It did what it was supposed to do. I was just the messenger. But it was singular, a shooting star, a nova. I won’t ever read it again.”
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. — called Nikki by her older sister — was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943. She was raised in Cincinnati and in the predominantly Black, middle-class suburb of Lincoln Heights. Her father, a juvenile-probation officer, was an alcoholic who beat her mother, a welfare-agency supervisor. Ms. Giovanni had vivid memories of the violence but dismissed suggestions that she had an especially bleak upbringing.
“childhood remembrances are always a drag / if you’re Black,” she wrote in “Nikki-Rosa,” one of her best-known poems. “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.”
Ms. Giovanni eventually persuaded her parents to let her live with her grandparents in Knoxville, where she went to high school. At 17, she enrolled early at Fisk University, a historically Black school in Nashville where she sparred with the university’s strict dean of women and was expelled after going home for Thanksgiving without permission. She returned to school a few years later, in 1964, after the dean’s departure.
At the time, she scarcely displayed the makings of a revolutionary. Ms. Giovanni said she voted for Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the conservative Republican candidate for president in 1964, and devoured books by Ayn Rand, admiring the author’s individualist philosophy. But she turned leftward with prodding from her roommate, who asked her: “How could Black people be conservative? What have they got to conserve?”
Immersing herself in the civil rights movement, Ms. Giovanni helped reestablish a campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She also edited a school literary magazine, studied with author John Oliver Killens and began writing for national publications, publishing a 1966 essay in Negro Digest that critiqued sexism among Black activists. “Is it necessary that I cease being a Black woman,” she wrote, “so that he can be a man?”
Ms. Giovanni graduated with a history degree in 1967. Less than two months later, her grandmother died, an event that inspired some of the grief-fueled poems that appeared in her first book, “Black Feeling Black Talk.” She self-published the collection in 1968, after becoming disenchanted by a semester spent studying social work at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ms. Giovanni in 2004.
She later moved to New York and published two more poetry collections, “Black Judgment” (1968) and “Re: Creation” (1970), which she promoted by giving readings at community centers and churches, sometimes joined by fellow Black Arts Movement poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and Don L. Lee, later known as Haki R. Madhubuti. By the early 1970s, she was speaking frequently at college campuses and charging up to $2,000 an appearance.
Among Black militants, she stood apart. She said she had two guns and, as riots swept the country in 1968, was prepared to use them. But she also made a point of speaking up for older delegates at conferences, trying to ensure that earlier generations of activists weren’t shouted down. “The shade of difference between me and the militant community,” she told the Baltimore Sun, “is that I give our parents credit that they at least made us what we are.”
Her political views softened partly because of the birth of her son, Thomas Watson Giovanni, who “gave my life meaning,” she told the Sun in 1974. She repeatedly declined to reveal the father’s identity, saying that his name was known only to close friends and family, including Thomas himself. “And,” she said, “the FBI knows.”
Ms. Giovanni did not elaborate, but noted in an interview with the Pittsburgh Press that she was occasionally visited by the bureau’s agents. “I used to invite them in for coffee because I knew they wanted to check out the place.” She stopped doing so, she added, because she got “a white shag rug and they all wear cloddy shoes.”
When her son was about 2, she published the children’s poetry collection “Spin a Soft Black Song” (1971). “No cheek-pinching auntie, she explores the contours of childhood with honest affection, sidestepping both nostalgia and condescension,” Nancy Klein wrote in a review for the Times.
The book was followed by a dozen more titles for children, including “Rosa” (2005), which was named a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal and told the story of civil rights activist Rosa Parks, with illustrations by Bryan Collier.
Ms. Giovanni at Virginia Tech in 2007. (Steve Helber/AP)
“I’ve been working in the children’s field mostly because — how can I say this nicely? You realize that they’re just being given a lot of crap,” Ms. Giovanni told the Virginian-Pilot in 2008. “The stuff we ask our kids to read is stupid. And then we wonder why they don’t enjoy reading. And why their imaginations aren’t engaged.”
To promote the work of other Black women poets, Ms. Giovanni founded a publishing cooperative, NikTom. She also looked toward the past, writing about civil rights activists and agents of social change in her poetry collection “Those Who Ride the Night Winds” (1983) and editing books such as “Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories about the Keepers of Our Traditions” (1994).
Ms. Giovanni was an early champion of hip-hop, which she linked to gospel music and described as “poetry with a beat.” She dedicated her collection “Love Poems” (1997) to the slain rapper Tupac Shakur, had the words “Thug Life” tattooed on her left arm in his honor and included verses by both Maya Angelou and Queen Latifah in her book “Hip Hop Speaks to Children” (2008).
Her other works included nonfiction books such as “Racism 101” (1994), which featured an essay indicting colleges and universities for preaching the value of multiculturalism while failing to diversify their faculty. By then she was teaching at Virginia Tech, where she was recruited in 1987 by Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, an English professor who became her biographer.
They lived together for more than three decades, with Ms. Giovanni calling Fowler not her “partner” but her “bench,” the person who had her back. They eventually married, according to the statement.
In addition to Fowler, survivors include her son and a granddaughter.
Ms. Giovanni continued writing poetry and recording spoken-word albums even as she battled lung cancer, which inspired poems in her collections “Blues: For All the Changes” (1999) and “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea” (2002). Her later work ranged widely in subject matter — from space travel and nature to her search for the world’s best beer — while continuing the exploration of Black American life she had started decades earlier.
“There is no / way not to like Black Americans. We try to practice love,” she wrote in the poem “Lemonade Grows From Soil, Too.” “We use the chicken feet to make a stew; we take the scraps of / cloth to make the quilt. We find the song in the darkest days / to say ‘put on your red dress, baby, ’cause we’re going out / tonight,’ understanding we may be lynched on the way home / but knowing between that cotton field and that house party / something wonderful has been shared.
“We are poetry,” she continued. “And poetry is us.”
SOURCE: washingtonpost.com