Celebrated poet, author, educator, and public speaker Nikki Giovanni has passed away at the age of 81. From humble beginnings, she rose to prominence, sharing her candid perspectives on a wide range of topics, from social injustices and love to space exploration and mortality.
Giovanni, the subject of the award-winning 2023 documentary Going to Mars, died on Monday. Her longtime partner, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, was with her, according to a statement released by friend and author Renée Watson.
“We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin,” stated Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni’s cousin, on behalf of the family.
Author of over 25 books, Giovanni was a gifted performer and confessor, known for her work, readings, live appearances, and her years teaching at Virginia Tech and other institutions. Her poetry collections, such as Black Judgement and Black Feeling Black Talk, sold thousands of copies, leading to appearances on The Tonight Show and other television programs. Her popularity was evident in her ability to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for her 30th birthday celebration.
Through her poetry, prose, and spoken word performances, she shared her life story. She reflected on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, discussed her battle with lung cancer, honored heroes like Nina Simone and Angela Davis, and explored personal passions such as food, romance, family, and the possibility of space travel – a journey she felt Black women were uniquely suited for given their resilience.
She also edited the groundbreaking anthology of Black women poets, Night Comes Softly, and co-founded a publishing cooperative that promoted the work of authors like Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker.
She was once hailed as “The Princess of Black Poetry.”
“All I know is the she is the most cowardly, bravest, least understanding, most sensitive, slowest to anger, most quixotic, lyingest, most honest woman I know,” wrote her friend Barbara Crosby in the introduction to The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni, a 2003 anthology of her nonfiction prose. “To love her is to love contradiction and conflict. To know her is to never understand but to be sure that all is life.”
Giovanni’s admirers included figures ranging from James Baldwin and Teena Marie, who mentioned her in the song “Square Biz,” to Oprah Winfrey, who invited her to her “Living Legends” summit in 2005, alongside Rosa Parks and Toni Morrison. Giovanni was a National Book Award finalist in 1973 for her prose work Gemini and received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.
In January 2009, at NPR’s request, she penned a poem about the incoming president, Barack Obama:
I’ll walk the streets
And knock on doors
Share with the folks:
Not my dreams but yours
I’ll talk with the people
I’ll listen and learn
I’ll make the butter
Then clean the churn
Giovanni had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1969. She chose not to marry his father, explaining to Ebony magazine, “I didn’t want to get married, and I could afford not to get married.” Later in life, she lived with her partner, Virginia Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech.
Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, she was nicknamed “Nikki” by her older sister. At age four, her family moved to Ohio, eventually settling in the Black community of Lincoln Heights outside Cincinnati. She maintained close ties to both Tennessee and Ohio, visiting her parents and maternal grandparents in her “spiritual home” in Knoxville.
As a child, she was an avid reader, enjoying everything from history books to Ayn Rand’s works. She was accepted to Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, after her junior year of high school. While excelling academically, editing the Fisk literary magazine, and helping establish the campus branch of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, she also clashed with school regulations and was briefly expelled for her defiance. After a change in the dean of women, she returned and graduated with honors in history in 1967.
Giovanni relied on friends for support to publish her first collection, Black Poetry Black Talk, in 1968, and that same year self-published Black Judgement. During the height of the Black Arts Movement, her early poems, including “A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why,” “Of Liberation,” and “A Litany for Peppe,” were powerful calls for the overthrow of white supremacy.
“I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?” she wrote in a biographical sketch for Contemporary Writers. “A poem has to say something. It has to make some sort of sense; be lyrical; to the point; and still able to be read by whatever reader is kind enough to pick up the book.”
Her political views evolved over time, though she remained a vocal advocate for social change and self-empowerment, never forgetting the struggles of the past. In 2020, she appeared in a campaign advertisement for Joe Biden, urging young people to vote.
Her best-known work, the 1968 poem “Nikki-Rosa,” is a powerful assertion of her self-definition, a warning against others misrepresenting her story, and a reflection on her childhood poverty and the joys she experienced despite it.
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy
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