Nikki Giovanni. | Photo © Nikki Giovanni
A PROFOUND VOICE and insightful wordsmith has passed on. Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024), the American poet, professor, public intellectual, and key figure in the Black Arts Movement, died in Blacksburg, Va., on Nov. 9. She was 81 years old. Virginia C. Fowler, Giovanni’s wife, told the New York Times the cause was complications of lung cancer.
Rife with metaphor, candor, and humor, Giovanni’s poetry covered the spectrum, touching on everything from race, politics, and the fight for equality; Black life, family dynamics, and the experiences of women; and love, voting, and space exploration. In recordings and live performances, her rhythmic words were often tuned to music, including jazz, gospel, and hip hop.
Throughout her career, Giovanni’s poignant prose and verse responded to sensitive issues of national concern, reflecting the world around her, and the many eras in which she lived. Known as an outspoken truth teller, she was a voice of strength and empathy when yet another school shooting stunned the country, this time on the campus of Virginia Tech, where she was on faculty.
“My dream was not to publish or to even be a writer: my dream was to discover something no one else had thought of. I guess that’s why I’m a poet. We put things together in ways no one else does,” Giovanni wrote in her biographical statement.
The author of more than 30 books, Giovanni penned “Black Feeling Black Talk” her first collection of poetry, and “Black Judgment” came soon after. Both were self-published in 1968. Many more books followed. “Those Who Ride the Night Winds” (1983) and “The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1995” (1996) also gathered her poetry. Among her essay collections, “Sacred Cows and Other Edibles” (1988) explored a variety of topics, and “Racism 101” (1994) excoriated inequities in higher education. Then came “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems” (2002). Decades later, “Bicycles: Love Poems” (2009) was a New York Times bestseller and she edited “The 100 Best African American Poems” (2010). More recent publications include “Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid” (2013)” and “Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose” (2020). Giovanni also wrote children’s books. Published in 2022, “A Library” is a poetic picture book that pays tribute to the foundational role books, libraries, and librarians played in her life.
“My dream was not to publish or to even be a writer: my dream was to discover something no one else had thought of. I guess that’s why I’m a poet. We put things together in ways no one else does.” — Nikki Giovanni
In 2021, Nikki Giovanni participated in The New York Times “Black History, Continued” series, reflecting on the pandemic and reading her poem “Going to Mars.” The poem draws parallels between the Middle Passage and going to Mars and inspired the title for the recent documentary about her life and work. | New York Times
ACTIVE FOR MORE THAN half a century, Giovanni was a prolific author who became a literary celebrity. She regularly gave readings and participated in public conversations and interviews during which she offered blunt commentary. These engaging events often took place at museums and other cultural institutions and continued right up until the end of her life.
In March, Giovanni opened the 2024 Women’s Jazz Festival at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The poet and saxophonist and composer Javon Jackson performed works from their 2022 album The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni, a collection of gospel hymns and spirituals reinterpreted as jazz tunes.
A mix of music and poetry, the show sold out. The day after she died, the Schomburg paid tribute to Giovanni on Instagram, calling her a poet, icon, activist and “friend” to the institution.
In April, Harvard Art Museums hosted Giovanni for a poetry reading and screening of the award-winning documentary “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.” On Nov. 1, she gave the keynote address for a name change celebration at Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum in Annapolis, Md., honoring Harriet Tubman whose name was added to the African American history museum’s moniker alongside her male counterparts. A week later in Charleston, S.C., Giovanni was in conversation at the International African American Museum with Tonya Matthews, the museum’s CEO.
Giovanni commented about the universal and the personal. She talked about her own experiences, the conditions of Black people, women, and working people, and the news and issues of the day, always with charm and charisma. She often said all she had was words.
Some of the most acclaimed and beloved poems by Giovanni include “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)’,” “Woman,” “Mothers,” “Knoxville, Tenn.,” “Nikki Rosa,” “My House,” “BLK History Month,” and “Revolutionary Dreams.” She kept writing until the end. At the time of her death, Giovanni was working on her final literary project. Her last collection of poems, letters, and other writings is expected to be published next fall.
Nikki Giovanni regularly gave readings and participated in public conversations and interviews during which she offered blunt commentary. These engaging events often took place at museums and other cultural institutions and continued right up until the end of her life.
Last year, with her 80th birthday approaching, Nikki Giovanni’s hometown press paid tribute to her nationally celebrated work and local roots in Knoxville, Tenn., where she was born. | Video by Knoxville News
BORN IN KNOXVILLE, TENN., Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr., grew up during segregation in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she fed her imagination at the local library. At age 16, she attended Fisk University, the HBCU in Nashville, where John Lewis was a fellow student and she encountered key literary figures such as Margaret Walker and Amiri Baraka. Giovanni was kicked out after one semester because of what she has called a “disagreement” with the school. When she returned John Oliver Killens was among her teachers. Giovanni graduated from Fisk in 1967, the same year she organized Cincinnati’s first Black Arts Festival.
Living in New York, she appeared regularly on Soul!, a Black arts and culture program on WNET. In 1971, she famously interviewed James Baldwin for the public television show, traveling to London to make it happen. The video is popular on social media and the timeless conversation has gained a follow among a new generation. Over the decades, she collaborated with fellow artists across disciplines. She was friends with key 20th century cultural figures, including Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison.
Starting in 1987, Giovanni taught English at Virginia Tech University for more than three decades. The university called on her in trying times. She recited poems at a ceremony following the mass shooting that killed 32 students and professors in 2007 and for the 2020 commencement at the height of the pandemic. She said one of her proudest moments at Virginia Tech was organizing Sheer Good Fortune: Celebrating Toni Morrison, a free event open to the public that was hosted by Angelou in 2012.
“We have the grand dame of poetry and we’re getting ready to have the grand dame of fiction on the same stage together,” Giovanni said. She retired a decade later in 2022.
Giovanni was connected to civil rights heroes and the hip hop generation. “Recognize: Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture,” a group exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., featured one poet (Giovanni) and six visual artists (Tim Conlon & Dave Hupp, Jefferson Pinder, David Scheinbaum, Shinique Smith, and Kehinde Wiley) working across painting, photography, graffiti, installation, and film.
Smith’s mixed-media installation was accompanied by and created in response to Giovanni’s poem “It’s Not a Just Situation: Though We Just Can’t Keep Crying About It (For the Hip Hop Nation That Brings Us Such Exciting Art).” In a statement for the 2008 exhibition, Smith said: “I’ve been a longtime fan of Giovanni’s poetry. Her poem ‘Woman’ got me through some difficult times. I think that she and I are both warriors, as many women have had and continue to be. For my site-specific installation, I’ve used lyrics from rap songs, married with text from Nikki Giovanni’s poem, to ‘riff’ calligraphically and to create 3-D mantras of found objects, script and clothing.”
University Distinguished Professor Emerita Nikki Giovanni retired in from Virginia Tech in 2022. In this video, Giovanni reflects on 35 years teaching in the Department of English and her affinity for the school, its football coach, and the Appalachian community. Among her accolades, Giovanni received Virginia Tech’s Ut Prosim Scholar Award. The poet is one of only five recipients of the honor named for the school’s motto of Ut Prosim (That I May Serve).” | Video by Virginia Tech
Giovanni’s exhibition statement said: “The reason, or at least one of the reasons, I am so proud of being invited to participate with ‘RECOGNIZE!’ is that the hip hop nation is wonderful. Surely there are those who would demonize this group of young people, but they are only doing what our ancestors have always done: used what they have to get where they need to go.”
In 2016, Giovanni performed at the 12th Annual Afropunk Brooklyn Festival. She also participated in Represent! A Night Of Jazz Hip Hop & Spoken Word at New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2022. Earlier this year on March 2, Giovanni and The New Yorker writer Doreen St. Felix were scheduled to participate in a public conversation at the Brooklyn Museum, following a screening of “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.”
Both canceled amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. The event was organized in collaboration with PEN America. In a statement, the writers said they had “withdrawn from the program in response to the refusal of both PEN America and Brooklyn Museum to stand in solidarity with people of Palestine and against genocide.”
A poem by Giovanni, “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” inspired the recent film directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. Giovanni’s life, work, memories, storytelling, and fascination with space are explored in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023.
An artistic and non-traditional biographical film, “Going to Mars” has been screened at numerous cultural institutions. Giovanni participated in many of the events, making appearances at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Lincoln Center during last year’s New York Film Festival, where she talked with author Edwidge Danticat; and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she was in conversation with the filmmakers.
“The hip hop nation is wonderful. Surely there are those who would demonize this group of young people, but they are only doing what our ancestors have always done: used what they have to get where they need to go.” — Nikki Giovanni
Trailer for “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.” Directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. | Video by HBO
Hannah Phifer also spoke to Giovanni about the film and asked the poet about her affinity for Mars. The interview was published online by the Oxford American in January. Giovanni gave a full-throttled response that revealed how she connects seemingly disparate ideas to make sense of the world:
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I was a history major. I graduated from Fisk, and as you think about various times in history, you try to think: Where have we seen this before? Several years ago now I wrote a poem called “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” and what caused me to think of it was I looked at Middle Passage, because I’m always reading about how Black Americans got from Africa to what was now called America. And of course, I finally realize that that’s space.
I’ve always liked space. I’ve always enjoyed just looking at the stars. If I could, I would just sit and watch the stars go by.
But in looking at Middle Passage, I realized, well, that’s outer space. It’s exactly the same thing, because you’re going from someplace you know through someplace you never know. That’s what we do when we put somebody on a rocket. They’re going from Earth into an area that they don’t know— they think they might know, but they’re not sure. You’re going up, up, up, and then you’re going to land, hopefully, on something that you can name. But you don’t know it, because nobody has landed on Mars; we don’t know any of this.
And so I thought, Well that’s what Black people have done. And we have survived and thrived and shared a lot of love. We brought a lot of goodness.
It’s a thoughtful interview that efficiently covers a lot of terrain. Giovanni also said she doesn’t do the internet, her grandmother was her first muse, and she spoke with empathy about transgender students. Asked what authors she is drawn to, she said Danticat; Kwame Alexander, her former student; and Morrison, her friend who she described as “quite a brilliant American writer.” She added: “I was really so happy to see Toni win the Nobel because it was well-, well-deserved. And I think that Edwidge should [win] also.”
Giovanni explained her stance on apartheid in South Africa, too. She definitely wasn’t pro-apartheid, she said, but felt the anti-apartheid movement was flawed because no one was concerned about what was going on elsewhere at the same time. For example, no one said anything about Haiti, she noted, which was under the violent autocratic rule of Papa Doc and then Baby Doc. Giovanni told Phifer she also thought the following: “Why are we worried about another country when we’re living in a country that is destroying or trying to destroy us?”
She added: “I like to cook. I like to read. I used to like the dust. I was reading some of my poetry recently, and it started off saying ‘I like the dust,’ but I don’t like the dust anymore. If you come to my house, you’d have to practically bring a tissue, because you sneeze. I am going to dust one day before Christmas because I have a lot of friends [and] I’m going to have a party. I’m making chitlins.” CT
FIND MORE about Nikki Giovanni on her website
FIND MORE about Nikki Giovanni i her obituary published by the New York Times, life in pictures feature, and 2021 interview with the New York Times Magazine about teaching difficult subjects such as slavery and out-cooking Bobby Flay
FIND MORE Kevin Young wrote a memorial tribute to Nikki Giovanni for The New Yorker and Veronica Chambers wrote posthumously about the poet’s interview with James Baldwin in The New York Times
FIND MORE Peter Bailey interviewed Nikki Giovanni for a feature profile published in the February 1972 issue of Ebony magazine
FIND MORE In 1983, Nikki Giovanni spoke with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. The radio program reposted an excerpt from the interview today. Giovanni reads her poems “Those Who Ride the Night Winds” and “Wintertime,” and “Nikki Rosa.” She also discusses making a living as a poet, being a woman poet, motherhood, her views on rap vs. poetry at the time, political organizing, attending college at 16, and reading Ayn Rand
FIND MORE about Nikki Giovanni x Muhammad Ali. The poet interviewed the boxer early in her career and later went on tour with him and they became friends. Giovanni talked about Ali and Malcolm X on the Rock Newman show in 2013. The conversation was recorded at Busboys & Poet in Washington, D.C.
Nikki Giovanni In Her Own Words:
In 1971, Nikki Giovanni, 28, interviewed James Baldwin, 47, for the WNET television program “Soul.” The expansive, intergenerational conversation was taped in London and aired in two parts. The writers discussed race in America, gender roles and relationships between Black women and Black men, and their literary crafts. This is Part 1. Watch Part 2 here. | Video by ALL ARTS TV
In 2005, The HistoryMakers hosted an evening with Nikki Giovanni in conversation with author, playwright, and activist Pearl Cleage in Atlanta, Ga. The wide-ranging conversation about Giovanni’s life and work was taped live by Georgia Public Broadcasting. | Video by The HistoryMakers
In 2012, Sheer Good Fortune: Celebrating Toni Morrison, a Virginia Tech event honoring the renowned author, was hosted by Maya Angelou, Joanne Gabbin, and Nikki Giovanni. This short documentary provides a behind-the-scenes look at the meaning behind the tribute and the planning of the special event. | Video by Virginia Tech
In 2013, Nikki Giovanni was a guest on Sway in the Morning, the SiriusXM radio show. Among many topics, the interview explored her connections to hip hop. Kanye West, Nas, and others have name-checked Giovanni in their songs. The poet explained her one and only tattoo—”Thug Life”—a tribute to Tupac, whom she did not know. She also said she was a fan of Queen Latifah and awed by what Beyonce has accomplished. | Video by Sway’s Universe
In 2016, Nikki Giovanni was in conversation at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, with author/poet Clint Smith, whose books include “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” The focus of their inter-generational conversation was Giovanni’s timeless, intergenerational interview with James Baldwin in 1971. | Video by Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
In 2017, Nikki Giovanni took the stage at Tedx in Herndon, Va., delivering a mix of poetry (“My Sister and Me,” “Fear,” and “Ego Tripping”) and talk about her father and hosting Sunday poetry readings back-in-the-day at Birdland, the jazz club in New York City. | Video by Tedx
Feb. 26, 2020: Weeks before the pandemic shut down public events in the United States, Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., hosted a poetry reading with Nikki Giovanni. She spent the evening reciting poems and telling stories to a capacity audience. | Video by Emory University
This 2020 Zoom conversation between Nikki Giovanni and artist Ashley Bryan (1923-2022) was part of the exhibition programming for “Let’s Celebrate Ashley Bryan!,” which was presented at the Bates Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine. A major survey of the Harlem-born, Maine-based artist, the show included more than 50 paintings, drawings, prints, and books. Giovanni counted Bryan among her friends. He illustrated two of her children’s books: “Rosa” (2005) and “I Am Loved” (2018). | Video by Bates College
Days after the November 2020 election, Nikki Giovanni appeared on The Breakfast Club with Charlamagne tha God and Angela Yee. Giovanni discussed her recently published book “Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose,” expressed her joy about the historic election of Kamala Harris as vice president, spoke up about the hard work done by immigrants, and wondered how many of the workers in the White House who changed beds and cooked died from COVID over the past year. She also talked about segregated movie theaters, making mistakes, and love. | Video by Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM
Nov. 8, 2022: Host Bianca Vivion welcomed Nikki Giovanni and The New Yorker critic Doreen St. Félix to discuss love, relationships, and self-worth in the age of social media. | Video by ALL ARTS TV
June 18, 2023: The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., hosted a screening of “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” followed by a discussion among co-directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson and Nikki Giovanni, moderated by Soyica Diggs Colbert, a Georgetown University professor of Black studies and performing arts. The event was part of DC/DOX, the documentary film festival. | Video by NMAAHC
BOOKSHELF
“The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things,” Nikki Giovanni’s final book is scheduled to be published in September 2025. In 1968, Giovanni self-published “Black Feeling Black Talk,” her first collection of poetry and followed with “Black Judgment.” Both were published in the same volume in 1970. Her memoir, “Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet” (1971) came soon after. These early volumes are hard to find. Other notable poetry collections include, “Those Who Ride the Night Winds” (1983), “The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1995” (1996), “Love Poems” (1997), and “Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems” (1999). Among her essay collections, “Sacred Cows and Other Edibles” (1988) explored a variety of topics, and “Racism 101” (1994) excoriated inequities in higher education. Edited by Virginia C. Fowler, “Conversations with Nikki Giovanni” was published in 1992. Years later, “Bicycles: Love Poems” (2009) was a New York Times bestseller and she edited “The 100 Best African American Poems” (2010). “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems” is much praised. Also consider, “On My Journey Now: Looking at African-American History Through the Spirituals” (2007). More recent publications include “Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid” (2013),” “A Good Cry: What We Learn From Tears and Laughter” (2017), and “Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose” (2020). Giovanni also wrote children’s books, including “A Library” (2022), a poetic picture book that pays tribute to the foundational role books, libraries, and librarians played in her life. “The Sun Is So Quiet” (2014) and “I Am Loved” (2018) feature illustrations by Ashley Bryan, Giovanni’s friend.
