Nicky Giovanni, the award-winning American poet who emerged as one of the leading voices of the black arts movement in the 1960s, has died at the age of 81.
Giovanni passed away on Monday after being diagnosed with cancer for the third time, his friend, writer Renee Watson, told NPR in a statement.
Poet Kwame Alexander said, “We will forever be grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us and to all literary children of the world.”
Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee, but nicknamed Nikki by her older sister, Giovanni attended Fisk University in Nashville. There she met several black literary figures, including Amiri Baraka and Dudley Randall, before studying poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts.
She published her first two poetry collections, Black Feeling, Black Talk, and Black Judgment, in 1968, and went on to write more than 30 books, including Riders on the Night Wind and Bicycles: Love Poems. Started an extensive career.
She became part of a burgeoning black arts movement that included figures such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Thelonious Monk, and Audre Lorde. As a civil rights activist and politically active writer, Giovanni also attracted the attention of the FBI. She told the Pittsburgh Press that she invited the investigators who were monitoring her to her home for coffee “because I knew they wanted to look at the place.”
Giovanni became a celebrity with his accessible poems about black liberation and poems about love, gender, and the small pleasures of family life. She appeared on the black arts program “Soul!” He has spoken with Baldwin and Muhammad Ali, edited numerous poems and essays, championed hip-hop, and written several children's books, including Rosa, an award-winning biography of Rosa Parks.
Giovanni taught English at Virginia Tech from 1987 to 2022. In 2007, one of his former poetry students killed 32 people in the Virginia Tech shootings. Giovanni later said she asked the university to remove him from her class in 2005 because she felt he was threatening.
Asked about the shooting, Giovanni said: “Murder is a lack of creativity. It's a lack of imagination. It's a lack of understanding of who you are and your place in the world. Life. That's interesting and a good idea.”
At the time of her death, she was working on a final collection of poetry and a memoir titled A Town Called Mulvaney.
“Before, I thought I was calmer,” Giovanni told the Guardian in February. “You know, being a grandma, I'm really cool. And I realized, no, there's still quite a bit of anger.”
Giovani was diagnosed with lung cancer in the 1990s and underwent several surgeries. She is survived by her son Thomas, her granddaughter, and her spouse Virginia Fowler, an English professor who became Giovanni's biographer before their marriage.
