The national treasure Nikki Giovanni died yesterday from complications connected to lung cancer. She was 81. A decorated writer of poems, nonfiction, and children’s books, Giovanni was also a star of the Black Arts Movement. She was a devoted activist, performer, parent, professor, and public thinker, and leaves behind a wake of intellectual descendants.
Giovanni wrote “irresistibly and sensuously, about race, politics, gender, sex and love,” and found fans early. After self-publishing her first two books, she wrote a memoir in 1971: Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet. Shortly after followed fame.
She received many awards over her long career, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the inaugural Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Award, the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, the Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts, the Emily Couric Leadership Award, a Literary Excellence Award. She was a seven-time recipient of the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for both a National Book Award and a Grammy. But her work was widely read in and outside the academy, and tended to transcend institutional affirmation.
She’s best in her own words. As in 1972, when she appeared on Soul!, a Black public affairs show, opposite her hero James Baldwin. (Here they are in conversation.) Or in the poem “Biography,” excerpted below.
I’m here
And if I mist
On emotional soil
A weed will
Grow
Make Me Rain
Let me be a part
Of this needed change
According to NPR, Giovanni was working right up until her death on her final poetry collection. That manuscript, titled THE LAST BOOK, is set to come out next year.
Rest in powerful peace, Nikki.
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