NEW YORK (AP) — Poet, author, educator, and speaker Nikki Giovanni rose from debt to publish her first book to explore everything from racism and love to space travel. He was a literary celebrity for decades, sharing his frank and conversational views on things. Mortality, died. She was 81 years old.
Giovanni, the subject of the award-winning 2023 documentary Going to Mars, is survived by his lifelong partner Virginia (Ginny) Fowler, according to a statement from friend and author Renee Watson. He died on Monday.
Giovanni's cousin, Alison (Pat) Ragan, said in a statement on behalf of the family: “We will forever be blessed to have shared the legacy and love with our beloved cousin.”
The author of more than 25 books, Giovanni is a natural confessor and performer, as fans have come to know her from her work, readings, and other live appearances, as well as her years as a faculty member at Virginia Tech. It has become. Poetry collections such as “Black Judgment” and “Black Feeling Black Talk” have sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from “The Tonight Show” and other television shows, and filled the 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center. It gained such popularity. Celebrating her 30th birthday.
She told her stories in poetry, prose, and spoken word. She reflects on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, champions the Black Power movement, talks about her battle with lung cancer, pays homage to heroes from Nina Simone to Angela Davis, and talks about food, romance, and family. , reflected on personal passions such as rockets into space. She believed that Black women were uniquely entitled to this journey simply because of how much Black women had already survived. She also edited Night Comes Softly, a groundbreaking anthology of black women poets, and helped found a publishing cooperative that promoted the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and others.
At one time, she was called the “Princess of Black Poetry.”
File/Nikki Giovanni has been a poet, activist, and essayist throughout her life. She is one of the most high-profile poets to emerge from the Black Arts movement of the late 60s. Her collection “Black Talk/Black Judgment” placed her at the forefront of the movement. Portrait taken during performance with UCLA Royce Hall. (Photo by Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images)
“I know that she is the most cowardly, the bravest, the least understanding, the most sensitive, the least angry, the most ridiculous, the most lying, the most Just that she is an honest woman,” her friend Barbara Crosby wrote in the preface to The Prose Soul. Nikki Giovanni,” an anthology of nonfiction prose published in 2003. “To love her is to love her contradictions and conflicts. To know her is never to understand, but to be convinced that all is life.”
Giovanni's fans range from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who name-checked Giovanni on her dance hit “Square Biz,” to Oprah Winfrey, who invited Giovanni to the 2005 “Living Legends” summit. Rosa Parks was also the guest of honor. And Toni Morrison. Giovanni was a finalist for the 1973 National Book Award for Gemini, a prose work about his life. She was also nominated for a Grammy Award for her spoken word album “Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection''.
In January 2009, at NPR's request, she wrote the following poem about President-elect Barack Obama:
“I'm going to walk around town.''
and knock on the door
Share with everyone:
It's not my dream, it's your dream
talk to people
listen and learn
make butter
Then clean the agitator.”
____
Giovanni had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1969. She did not marry her father. “I didn't want to get married, and I couldn't afford not to get married,” she told Ebony magazine. For the second half of his life, he lived with his partner Virginia Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech.
She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, and soon began to be called “Nikki” by her older sister. Her family moved to Ohio when she was four years old, eventually settling in the black community of Lincoln Heights, a suburb of Cincinnati. She traveled frequently between Tennessee and Ohio, and was tied to her parents and maternal grandparents in her “spiritual home” of Knoxville.
As a young girl, she read everything from history books to Ayn Rand, and after her senior year of high school, she enrolled at Fisk University, a historically black school in Nashville. My college years were both a time of accomplishment and a time of worry. She excelled in academics, edited the literary magazine Fisk, and helped found the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. However, she rebelled against the school's curfew and other rules and was temporarily expelled because her “behavior was not in keeping with a Fisk woman,” she later wrote. After the school's female dean was replaced, Giovanni returned and graduated with historical honors in 1967.
With the help of friends, Giovanni published his debut collection, Black Poetry: Black Talk, published in 1968, and self-published Black Judgment in the same year. At the height of the radical black arts movement, Giovanni's early poems such as “Short Essays of Affirmation Explaining Why,” “On Liberation,” and “Litany for Pepe” overthrow white power. It was a combative call. (“The worst junkie or black businessman is more human than the best honky.”)
“I've been thought of as a writer who writes from anger, but that confuses me. What else do writers write from?” She wrote a biographical sketch for Modern Writer magazine. . “A poem has to say something. It has to have some meaning. It has to be lyrical. To the point; and it has to be readable by anyone who picks up the book. can.”
Although her opposition to the political system softened over time, she never stopped advocating for change and self-empowerment or commemorating the martyrs of the past. In 2020, she appeared in an ad for presidential candidate Joe Biden, urging young people to vote because “someone died so we could have the right to vote.”
Her most famous works were created early in her career. 1968 poem “Nikki Rosa”. It is a declaration of her right to define herself and a warning to others (including obituary writers) against telling her story, from childhood poverty and holiday gatherings. It was a short meditation on the blessings that lead up to “bathing in one of the great bathtubs.” It was more than just “Chicagoans having barbecue.”
“And I really hope white people don’t have a cause.”
to write about me
because they'll never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they will
I'll probably tell you about my difficult childhood.
and never understand it
I was very happy during that time.”
