Nikki Giovanni
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist and educator. One of the world's best-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for a 2004 Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni was a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution". During the 1970s, she began writing children's literature, and co-founded a publishing company, NikTom Ltd, to provide an outlet for other African-American women writers. Over subsequent decades, her works discussed social issues, human relationships, and hip hop. Poems such as "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki-Rosa" have been frequently re-published in anthologies and other collections.
Giovanni received numerous awards and held 27 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities. She was also given the key to more than two dozen cities. Giovanni was honored with the NAACP Image Award seven times. She had a South American bat species, Micronycteris giovanniae, named after her in 2007.
Giovanni was proud of her Appalachian roots and worked to change the way the world views Appalachians and Affrilachians.
Giovanni taught at Queens College, Rutgers, and Ohio State, and was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech until she retired on September 11, 2022. After the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, she delivered a well-received chant-poem at a memorial for the shooting victims.
Life and work
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Yolande Cornelia Sr. and Jones "Gus" Giovanni. At age four, the family moved to Lincoln Heights, Ohio, near Cincinnati, where her parents worked at Glenview School. In 1948, the family moved to Wyoming, Ohio, and sometime in those first three years, Giovanni's sister, Gary, began calling her "Nikki". In 1958, Giovanni returned to Knoxville to live with her grandparents and attend Austin High School. As a child, she was an avid reader. In 1960, she began her studies at her grandfather's alma mater, Fisk University in Nashville, as an "early entrant", which meant that she could enroll in college without having finished high school first.She immediately clashed with the then-Dean of Women and was expelled after not having obtained the required permission from the dean to leave campus and travel home for Thanksgiving break. Giovanni moved back to Knoxville, where she worked at a Walgreens drug store and helped care for her nephew, Christopher. In 1964, Giovanni spoke with the new Dean of Women at Fisk University, Blanche McConnell Cowan, who urged her to return to Fisk that fall. While at Fisk, Giovanni edited a student literary journal, reinstated the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and published an essay in Negro Digest on gender questions in the Movement. In 1967, she graduated with honors with a B.A. degree in history.
Soon after graduation, she lost her grandmother, Louvenia Watson, and turned to writing poems to cope with the death. These poems would later be included in her collection Black Feeling, Black Talk. In 1968, Giovanni took a semester at University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work toward an MSW and then moved to New York City. She briefly attended Columbia University School of the Arts toward an MFA in poetry and privately published Black Feeling Black Talk. In 1969, Giovanni began teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University. She was an active member of the Black Arts Movement beginning in the late 1960s. In 1969, she gave birth to Thomas Watson Giovanni, her only child. She told Ebony magazine: "I had a baby at 25 because I wanted to have a baby and I could afford to have a baby. I didn't want to get married, and I could afford not to get married."
After the birth of her son, Giovanni was accused of setting a bad example as an unmarried mother, which was uncommon at that time. Giovanni noted that the birth of her son helped her to realize that children have different interests and require different content than adults. This realization led her to write six children's books.
In 1970, Giovanni founded the publishing company NikTom, publishing her own work as well as supporting the work of other Black women writers, among them Gwendolyn Brooks, Mari Evans, Carolyn Rodgers, and Margaret Walker. From 1970, she began making regular appearances on the television program Soul!, an entertainment/variety/talk show that promoted Black art and culture and allowed political expression. In addition to being a regular guest on the show, Giovanni for several years helped design and produce episodes. Giovanni's conversation with James Baldwin on Soul!, filmed in London and broadcast in 1971 as a two-part special, is considered a defining moment in her career, and subsequently became a book. She appeared on other television programs, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1972, accruing such popularity that her 30th birthday celebration at the Lincoln Center filled a 3,000-seat hall. Between 1973 and 1987, she published multiple poetry anthologies and children's books, and released spoken-word albums.
In 1987, Giovanni was recruited by her partner and eventual wife Virginia Fowler to teach creative writing and literature at Virginia Tech. There, Giovanni later became a University Distinguished Professor, before retiring in 2022. She received the NAACP Image Award seven times, received 20 honorary doctorates and various other awards, including the Rosa Parks and the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters. She also held the key to several different cities, including Dallas, Miami, New York City, and Los Angeles. She was a member of the Prince Hall Order of the Eastern Star, she received the Life Membership and Scroll from the National Council of Negro Women, and was an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Image:Nikki Giovanni speaking at Emory University 2008.jpg|thumb|256px|Giovanni speaking at Emory University in 2008
Giovanni was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early 1990s and underwent numerous surgeries. Her book Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems, published in 1999, contains poems about nature and her battle with cancer. In 2002, Giovanni spoke in front of NASA about the need for African Americans to pursue space travel, and later published Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems, which dealt with similar themes.
She was also honored for her life and career by The HistoryMakers, along with being the first person to receive the Rosa L. Parks Women of Courage Award. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor from Dillard University in 2010. In 2015, Giovanni was named one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History" for her contributions to poetry, education, and society.
In 2020, Giovanni gave an extended interview to Bryan Knight's Tell A Friend podcast where she gave an assessment of her life and legacy.
Giovanni released an album, The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni, on February 8, 2022.
She is the subject of the documentary film Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, which premiered at and won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary features Giovanni's son and granddaughter, as well as Giovanni's spouse Virginia Fowler, a fellow academic and author.
Virginia Tech shooting
, a mass murderer who killed 32 people in the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007, was a student in one of Giovanni's poetry classes. Describing him as "mean" and "menacing", she approached the department chair to have Cho taken out of her class, and said she was willing to resign rather than continue teaching him. Cho was removed from her class in 2005. After the massacre, Giovanni stated that, upon hearing of the shooting, she immediately suspected that Cho might be the shooter.Giovanni was asked by Virginia Tech president Charles Steger to give a convocation speech at the April 17 memorial service for the shooting victims. She expressed that she usually felt very comfortable delivering speeches, but worried that her emotion would get the best of her. On April 17, 2007, at the Virginia Tech convocation commemorating the April 16 massacre, Giovanni closed the ceremony with a chant poem: She thought that ending with a thrice-repeated "We will prevail" would be anticlimactic, and she wanted to connect back with the beginning, for balance. So, shortly before going onstage, she added a closing: "We are Virginia Tech." Her performance received an over 90-second standing ovation from the over-capacity audience in Cassell Coliseum, including then-president George W. Bush.
Later life and death
Giovanni announced her retirement from Virginia Tech in September 2022, having taught there for 35 years. She was conferred the title of University Distinguished Professor Emerita by the university in December 2022.On December 9, 2024, Giovanni died of complications from lung cancer in a hospital in Blacksburg, Virginia. She was 81. She had been working on a memoir titled A Street Called Mulvaney, and her final poetry collection, The Last Book, was set for publication in 2025.