Nikki Giovanni, poet and literary celebrity, has died at 81
NEW YORK– Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and public speaker who rose from borrowing money to publish her first book to decades as a literary celebrity sharing her blunt and conversational take on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality, has died. She was 81.
Giovanni, subject of the award-winning 2023 documentary “Going to Mars,” died Monday with her lifelong partner, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, by her side, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson
“We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin,” Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni’s cousin, said in a statement on behalf of the family.
Giovanni, author of more than 25 books, was a born confessor and performer whom fans came to know well through her work, her lectures and other live performances, and her years on the faculty of Virginia Tech, among others. Poetry collections like “Black Judgment” and “Black Feeling Black Talk” sold thousands of copies, led to invitations to “The Tonight Show” and other television programs and made her popular enough to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center . a celebration of her 30th birthday.
She told her story in poetry, prose and spoken word. She reflected on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, spoke about her battle with lung cancer, paid tribute to heroes from Nina Simone to Angela Davis and reflected on personal passions such as food, romance, family and space travel. , a journey that she believed black women were uniquely qualified to undertake, if only because of how much they had already survived. She also edited a groundbreaking anthology of black women poets, “Night Comes Softly,” and helped found a publishing cooperative that promoted works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker, among others.
For a time she was called ‘The Princess of Black Poetry’.
“All I know is that she is the most cowardly, bravest, least understanding, most sensitive, slowest to anger, most quixotic, most lying, most honest woman I know,” her friend Barbara Crosby wrote in the introduction to “The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni,” an anthology of nonfiction prose published in 2003. “Loving her means loving contradiction and conflict. To know her is never to understand, but to be sure that everything is life.’
Giovanni’s admirers ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who mentioned her name on the dance hit “Square Biz,” to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her “Living Legends” summit in 2005, when Rosa Parks was among the other guests of honor. and Toni Morrison. Giovanni was a National Book Award finalist in 1973 for a prose work about her life, “Gemini.” She also received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.”
In January 2009, at the request of NPR, she wrote a poem about the incoming president, Barack Obama:
‘I’m going to walk through the streets
And knock on doors
Share with the people:
Not my dreams, but yours
I’ll talk to the people
I will listen and learn
I’m going to make 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.” During 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 four when her family moved to Ohio, eventually settling in the black community of Lincoln Heights, outside Cincinnati. She often traveled between Tennessee and Ohio, tied 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 after her freshman year of high school was accepted into Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville. College was a time for achievement and for trouble. Her grades were good, she edited the literary magazine Fisk and helped establish the campus chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. But she rebelled against the school bells and other rules and was kicked out for a while because her “attitude did not fit that of a Fisk woman,” she later wrote. After the school changed its dean of women, Giovanni returned and graduated with honors in history in 1967.
Giovanni relied on the support of friends to publish her debut collection “Black Poetry Black Talk,” which came out in 1968, and the same year she self-published “Black Judgment.” The radical Black Arts movement was at its height, and early Giovanni poems like “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 human/Than the best honkie”).
“I’m considered a writer who writes out of anger, and that confuses me. What else do writers write out of?” she wrote in a biographical sketch for contemporary writers. “A poem must say something. It must somehow make sense; be lyrical; to the point; and yet be readable by any reader kind enough to pick up the book.”
Her opposition to the political system moderated over time, although she never stopped advocating change and self-empowerment, or remembering past martyrs. In 2020, she was featured in an ad for presidential candidate Joe Biden, urging young people to “vote because someone died so you could 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) not to tell her story and a short meditation on her poverty as a girl and its blessings , from holiday gatherings to bathing in “one of those big bathtubs.” that people in Chicago barbecue,” which transcends it.
“And I really hope no white person ever has a reason
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is black wealth, and it will be so
probably talking about my difficult childhood
and never understand that
All this time I was very happy”