Source

• Date of Birth: June 7, 1943
• Place of Birth: Knoxville, Tennessee
• Claim to Fame: poet, writer, social activist, and educator

Full name: Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Nikki Giovanni prides herself in being "a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English." One of Americas most read poets, Nikki Giovanni has written over two dozen books, which include volumes of poetry, children's books and collected essays. A CD of her poetry was a contender for the Grammy Award in the spoken word category in 2003.

Nikki Giovanni has received over 20 honorary doctorates and has been named "Woman of the Year" by Ebony, Mademoiselle and Ladies Home Journal. Additional honors include the Langston Hughes award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters in 1996 and the NAACP Image Award for Literature in 1998, 2000 and 2003. Nikki Giovanni is currently a professor of English and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Black Studies at Virginia Tech, where she has been a member of faculty since 1987.

Last updated: June 05, 2007.

• Born: 7 June 1943
• Birthplace: Knoxville, Tennessee
• Best Known As: Poet who wrote "Ego-Tripping"

Name at birth: Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr.

Nikki Giovanni is an African-American poet and essayist who came to prominence during the civil rights movement of the late 1960s. Born in Tennessee and raised in Ohio, she was educated at Fisk and Columbia universities. In the '60s she joined the Black Arts Movement and became one of the leading poets of the Black Power wing of activists. Giovanni had early fame for her poetry collections Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Black Judgement (1968) and Re: Creation (1970), and for her published conversations with writer James Baldwin (1973). Since then she has been a prolific writer, busy speaker, professor of English (at Virginia Tech) and outspoken social critic. She has received numerous honors and awards, including NAACP Image Awards and a Grammy nomination for her spoken-word CD The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection (2002). Her works include the poems "Ego-Tripping" and "All Eyez On You" (on the death of rapper Tupac Shakur), and the collections My House (1972), Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978) and Love Poems (1997). She has also published books of poetry for children, including The Genie in the Jar and The Sun is So Quiet (both 1996).

Giovanni sports a "Thug Life" tattoo on her arm... After the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech that left 32 people dead, Giovanni reported that she had once had the alleged killer, Cho Sueng-Hui, as a student. His "intimidating" behavior was such that Giovanni had him removed from her class.

Giovanni, Nikki (b. 1943), poet, essayist, lecturer, and educator. Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., on 7 June in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Jones and Yolande Giovanni, Nikki Giovanni became one of the most prominent young poets to emerge from the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her initial achievement of national recognition grew out of the militant, revolutionary poems included in her first two volumes, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgement (1969); this early success became the foundation for a sustained career as an important, often controversial, writer, the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including ten honorary doctorates.

Although she grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, Giovanni was profoundly influenced by and has consciously identified with the values and traditions of the South. She spent many summer vacations with her maternal grandparents in Knoxville and lived with them during her high school years (1957–1960). Her grandmother, Emma Louvenia Watson, helped shape Giovanni's belief in the power of the individual and her commitment to serving others, values important in both her poetry and her conception of herself as a writer. Like Langston Hughes, Giovanni has identified herself throughout her career as a ““poet of the people”,” and she has consistently addressed ordinary people, rather than literary scholars or critics, in her poetry and essays.

At age seventeen, Giovanni entered Fisk University as an early entrant but was dismissed at the end of her first semester because, as she states in Gemini (1971), her “attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman.” She returned to Fisk four years later and graduated magna cum laude in February 1967 with a degree in history. While she was a student, she participated in the Fisk Writing Workshops directed by John O. Killens and reinstituted the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She briefly pursued graduate study, first in social work at the University of Pennsylvania (1967–1968) and then in fine arts at Columbia University (1969). By 1970, she had given birth to a son (Thomas Watson Giovanni), combined and published with William Morrow her first two volumes (originally self-published) under the title Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, and distributed through Broadside Press a third volume, Re: Creation (1970). Some of the poems in these early volumes gained even wider recognition when, in 1971, she recorded them in juxtaposition to gospel music on the award-winning album Truth Is on Its Way. Although Giovanni was not the first of her generation to combine poetry and music, her album enjoyed an unprecedented success. Along with the hundreds of readings and lectures she gave during the early 1970s on college campuses and in churches and civic centers throughout the country, Truth helped establish her as an oral poet whose work was intimately connected to its performance.

Many of the poems that led to Giovanni's identification as an angry, militant poet appear in Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, including such well-known poems as “The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro” and ““The Great Pax Whitie”.” These poems are matched, however, by short lyric poems that explore more private concerns or celebrate personal and familial relationships, such as the well-known poems ““Knoxville”, “Tennessee”” and ““Nikki Rosa”.” This division between political and revolutionary themes, on the one hand, and more personal themes, on the other, continues, in different permutations, throughout Giovanni's later volumes of poetry and prose. The anger at injustices perpetrated by the forces of racism that is expressed in “And the word was death to all niggers” (““The Great Pax Whitie””) continues to be counterpointed by the celebration of African American people so eloquently captured in the famous line from ““Nikki Rosa”,” ““Black love is black wealth”.”

Perhaps because Giovanni eventually abandoned the rhetoric of militancy, and perhaps because she insisted on her own independence and autonomy, her critics and reviewers voiced increasing disapproval of her poetry. Margaret B. McDowell, analyzing reviews of Giovanni's work between 1969 and 1974, has shown that “critics have allowed personal and political attitudes not merely to affect their judgment but to dominate it.” In fact, although the poems in Re: Creation and the pivotal My House (1972) do not employ the kind of explosive language characteristic of Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, many of them do concern themselves with subjects that today are recognized as socially and politically significant. As an African American woman and single mother, Giovanni confronts in these volumes questions concerning female identity and female autonomy. She rejects the male constructions of female identity that have led to the double oppression of African American women and asserts instead the right and the necessity for African American women to shape their own identities. Included in Re: Creation, for example, is the now classic ““Ego Tripping””; through a sustained use of hyperbole, the poem celebrates the African American woman as the creator of the universe and all the treasures within it. The concluding lines of the poem reveal why Giovanni's work has had an empowering effect on the lives of many young African American women: “I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal / I cannot be comprehended / except by my permission / I mean … I…can fly / like a bird in the sky.”

The poems in My House similarly offer a series of statements about Giovanni's conception of herself as an African American woman and as a poet. The volume opens with ““Legacies”,” which acknowledges the importance of one's past and one's ancestors in the creation of identity, and concludes with ““My House”,” which uses the house as a symbol of the female poet and the domestic activities within the house as figures to express the authority and power of the poet. The poem insists—as do others in the volume—on the poet's right to decide the meaning of ““revolution”,” her right to decide the appropriate subject matter of her poetry, and, ultimately, her right to create her own identity.

My House is divided into two sections, ““The Rooms Inside”” and ““The Rooms Outside””; the first group charts the poet's individual, personal growth, while the second provides the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which that self has been shaped. In ““The Rooms Outside”,” for example, three short poems about the poet's visits to Africa explore the ambivalent relationship of African Americans to Africa. ““Africa I”” sounds the keynote of the volume as well as of Giovanni's work in general. The question facing the speaker is whether to trust her own vision of Africa or to allow that vision to be ““corrected”” by others apparently more knowledgeable: ““but my grandmother stood up / from her rocker just then / and said you call it / like you see it / john brown and i are with you”.” These lines might almost function as Giovanni's credo in their insistence that the writer, supported and empowered by her ancestors, must trust the authority of her own vision.

In her subsequent volumes of adult poetry—The Women and the Men (1975), Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978), and Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983)—Giovanni continues to write both introspective poems and poems addressing social and political issues. Also apparent in all her poetry, from Re: Creation onward, is the influence of music—the blues, rhythm and blues, and jazz—on her poetic forms and figures. Students can now more readily trace the development of Giovanni's poetic career in the recent collection of her poetry, The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996), which brings together some 150 poems. The alternation between personal and social concerns is also evident in Gemini, a collection of autobiographical essays, some written in a private voice remembering the personal past, and others written in a public voice responding to larger social issues. This duality continues in Giovanni's essay collections, Sacred Cows… And Other Edibles (1988) and Racism 101 (1994). In the latter volume, Giovanni alternately fuses and juxtaposes these two voices, often with brilliant results.

Giovanni's early success led to two important ““conversations”” with other writers: A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (1972) and A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974). Giovanni has also written several volumes of poetry for children: Spin a Soft Black Song (1971), Ego Tripping and Other Poems for Young Readers (1973), and Vacation Time (1979). Several of her poems have been published as illustrated children's books: Knoxville, Tennessee, illustrated by Larry Johnson (1994), The Genie in the Jar, illustrated by Chris Raschka (1996), and The Sun Is So Quiet, illustrated by Ashley Bryan (1996). Giovanni's poems for children are characterized by a playfulness with language and rhythms that appeals to children of all ages; in their recreation of the sounds and smells and sights of childhood, many of these poems clearly have appeal to both children and adults. Her commentary on Harlem Renaissance poets in the anthology Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate (1996) is similarly of interest to both young and mature readers. Giovanni published Love Poems in 1997 and Blues: For all the Changes: New Poems in 1999.

While the guardians of literary history have often been puzzled by the sometimes dizzying contradictions posed by Giovanni's poetry and prose, ordinary people—the people for whom she states she has always written—continue to keep her works in print, continue to fill the auditoriums in which she reads and lectures. Her place in literary history is undisputed because her voice speaks to and for people—about their joys and their sorrows, the forces arrayed against them and the strengths they bring as resistance—in tones and language they can understand.

Bibliography

• Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, A New Tradition, 1976.
• Eugene B. Redmond, Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, 1976.
• Anna T. Robinson, Nikki Giovanni: From Revolution to Revelation, 1979.
• Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work, 1983.
• William J. Harris, “Sweet Soft Essence of Possibility: The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni,” in Black Women Writers 1950–1980, ed. Mari Evans, 1984, pp. 218–228.
• Margaret B. McDowell, “Groundwork for a More Comprehensive Criticism of Nikki Giovanni,” in Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, eds. Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot, Studies in Black American Literature, vol. 2, 1986, pp. 135–160.
• Martha Cook, “Nikki Giovanni: Place and Sense of Place in Her Poetry”, in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, ed. Tonette Bond Inge, 1990, pp. 279–300.
• Virginia C. Fowler, Nikki Giovanni, 1992.
• Ekaterini Georgoudaki, “Nikki Giovanni: The Poet as Explorer of Outer and Inner Space,” in Women, Creators of Culture, ed. Georgoudaki and Domna Pastourmatzi, 1997, pp. 153–170

Virginia C. Fowler

• Genre: Vocal Music
• Active: '60s - 2000s
• Instrument: Poetry

Biography

One of the most popular and acclaimed African-American poets of the 20th century, Nikki Giovanni came of age in the heady, militant era of the civil rights movement, and her most influential poetry was suffused with all the spirit and vitality of a new age. Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, TN, on June 7, 1943; her family moved to Cincinnati shortly thereafter, but Giovanni returned to Knoxville to live with her grandparents in 1957. She was an early enrollee at Nashville's all-black Fisk University in 1960, but was dismissed before completing her first year; she returned to Cincinnati and worked for a few years, then returned to Fisk in 1964 to finish her B.A. While there, she served as an assistant in the writers' workshop and got involved in the university chapter of SNCC, a non-violent civil rights organization. After graduating, she moved to New York in 1968 to attend Columbia's School of Fine Arts, and published three poetry collections over 1968-1970 to considerable attention and acclaim.

In 1970, Giovanni established her own NikTom publishing company, and the following year recorded some of her most celebrated poems for the Right On label as Truth Is on Its Way, with gospel backing by the New York Community Choir. The record was a genuine hit, climbing all the way to number 15 on the R&B album charts. A second outing with the New York Community Choir, Like a Ripple on a Pond, was released on the NikTom imprint in 1973 and just missed the Top 50. Giovanni switched gears for her third musical outing, enlisting Arif Mardin to write backing music for 1975's The Way I Feel. Naturally, Giovanni stayed with her primary creative outlet as a poet during this time, in addition to lecturing across the country; motherhood brought a surge of poetry written for children, and Folkways issued two recordings in this vein, The Reason I Like Chocolate (1976) and Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978); Folkways also put out another Giovanni recording, Legacies, in 1976. She continued to write and lecture through the '80s and '90s, and has served as a professor of English at Virginia Tech since the late '80s. A new recording taken from a 1997 live reading, In Philadelphia, was released on Collectables, which also reissued her first three albums on CD. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide

Poems Buy this CD

In Philadelphia Buy this CD

Like a Ripple on a Pond Buy this CD

poet; writer; college teacher

Personal Information

Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, TN; daughter of Jones (a probation officer) and Yolande Watson Giovanni; children: Thomas Watson
Education: Fisk University, BA, 1967; attended University of Cincinnati, 1961-63, University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, 1968, Columbia University School of the Arts, 1968.
Memberships: State of Tennessee Literary Arts Festival, co-chair, 1986; Society of Magazine Writers, National Black Heroines for PUSH; Winnie Mandela Children's Fund Committee; Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, board of directors, 1990-93.

Career

Queens College (CUNY) and Rutgers University, teacher, 1969; NikTom, Ltd. (communications company), founder and publisher, 1970; Ohio State University, visiting professor of English, 1984; Mount Joseph on the Ohio, professor of creative writing, 1985-87; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, visiting professor of English, 1987-89, professor of English, 1989-; Warm Hearth Writer's Workshop, director, 1988-.

Life's Work

Nikki Giovanni began to be known in the late 1960s as one of the strongest voices of the newly emerging Black Arts movement. Along with other "new black poets," such as Haki Madhubuti, Etheridge Knight, and Sonia Sanchez, Giovanni was published by Dudley Randall's Broadside Press. As Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon have written, these poets had a "constructively emotional impact on the collective racial ego of black America." Giovanni in particular, declared Virginia C. Fowler in the introduction to Conversations With Nikki Giovanni, has been one of the "most vital and eventually most famous" voices in the "Black Arts movement's challenge to existing assumptions about poetry." With more than a dozen volumes of poetry to her credit, Nikki Giovanni has been instrumental in shaping the direction of contemporary black American poetry.

Nikki Giovanni was born on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Jones and Yolande Watson Giovanni. Shortly after her birth, the family moved first to Woodlawn, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, then to Wyoming, Ohio, and ultimately to the black community of Lincoln Heights, Ohio. Giovanni's father often had to work several jobs during these years. Giovanni, however, described her childhood--spent with her parents and older sister Gary--with vivid and fond details in what her biographer, Virginia Fowler, called Giovanni's "signature poem," "Nikki-Rosa" from Black Judgement. Knowing that readers will often draw false conclusions about the factual details of one's life, Giovanni says they will "probably talk about my hard childhood/and never understand that/all the while I was quite happy."

Strong Spirit Fostered Early

Despite poverty, the Giovannis provided hundreds of books and a piano for their daughters. The most famous line of the poem summarizes Giovanni's subjective experience of her childhood: "Black love is black wealth." In 1957 Nikki Giovanni decided to return to what she regarded as her "spiritual" home, the home of her maternal grandparents, John Brown and Emma Louvenia Watson in Knoxville, Tennessee. Young Nikki, her sister, and cousins had spent many summer vacations and other holidays at their grandparents' house. Louvenia Watson's strong spirit, Fowler mentioned in her book, "gave her granddaughter a sense of belonging in the world." Fowler described Giovanni's "radicalization" process while she lived with her grandparents, saying that "Louvenia instilled in her a belief in the importance of individual action, of the moral imperative to 'stand up and be counted' whether your side wins or not."

It was at Austin High School in Knoxville that Giovanni began her education in African-American literature. According to Fowler, Giovanni's English teacher throughout high school, Miss Alfredda Delaney, "launched her on a course of reading Afro-American writers and required her to write about what she read." Giovanni left high school after the 11th grade because she was accepted to Fisk University's Early Entrants Program in 1960. However, she was dismissed after her first semester because she visited her grandparents at Thanksgiving without receiving formal permission from the University authorities.

In Gemini Giovanni explained that she was "released from the school" because her "attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman." Giovanni returned to her parents' home in Cincinnati, where she began working at Walgreen's Drug Store and taking classes at the University of Cincinnati. When she reentered Fisk in 1964, she engaged in literary and radical activities, including reestablishing the university's chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), editing the student literary magazine, and participating in John O. Killen's creative writing workshop.

Launched Writing Career

When Giovanni graduated with honors in history from Fisk in the spring of 1967, she returned to Cincinnati and continued to develop her interests in writing and political activity that had been fostered at Fisk. Her articles and book reviews began appearing in periodicals such as Negro Digest and Black World, and the poetry she began to write formed her first volume, Black Feeling, Black Talk. Her grandmother's death in 1967, as much as the increasing activities of the Civil Rights movement, provided the impetus for much of her poetry in Black Feeling, Black Talk.

And as Martha Cook explained, her other publications "consistently attack[ed] elitism in the Black Arts movement" and "praised writers whom she viewed as presenting a realistic yet positive picture of black life," including "new" and "established" voices. Giovanni's other post graduate activities included organizing the first Cincinnati Black Arts Festival and Cincinnati's black theatrical group, The New Theatre. In May of 1967, Giovanni met H. Rap Brown at the Detroit Conference of Unity and Art, and, as Virginia Fowler described it, "from this point forward, she was closely involved with many of the key figures of the Black Arts movement and the Black Power movement."

After a semester at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work, in 1968, Giovanni moved to New York City, which would be her home for the next ten years. Although she received a grant from the National Foundation of the Arts to attend Columbia University's School of Fine Arts, she found she couldn't work with what Virginia Fowler labelled "the conservative white literary critics ... who tried to tell her she could not write." At this point in 1968 Giovanni had her first collection of poetry privately published.

Works Garnered Praise and Notice

Giovanni's second volume of poetry, Black Judgement, was published in 1969 with the assistance of a grant from the Harlem Council of the Arts. Sheila Weller of Mademoiselle magazine believed Giovanni to be "one of the most powerful figures on the new black poetry scene--both in language and appeal." Also during 1969, Giovanni gave birth to her son, Thomas Watson Giovanni. Giovanni later told Peter Bailey of Ebony magazine that she had a baby "because I wanted to have a baby" and that she didn't marry the father because "I didn't want to get married, and I could afford not to get married." According to Martha Cook, "Giovanni has remained unmarried and has consistently viewed her single motherhood as a positive choice."

During 1969 Giovanni began teaching at Queens College and Rutgers University. In 1970 William Morrow combined Giovanni's first two collections of poetry and published them under the title Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement. During the same year, Dudley Randall's Broadside Press published Re: Creation, and in 1971, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement was published. These volumes of poetry deal with both personal and political topics, and with them, as Fowler noted, "Giovanni enters the dialogue of the 1960s about black identity." Fowler also identified the poems' "rage against white America that was largely responsible for earning her the label of 'revolutionary poet.'"

The strong voice of a "black female poet" was emerging. Fowler explained that "the question of female identity addressed in only a few poems of Black Judgement is a central theme of Re: Creation," and Barbara Christian has written that when Giovanni "addresses herself to the problems of the black woman she puts all her poetic force, rap, and rhythm into illuminating the situation." What readers perceived to be a shift in emphasis from the political to the personal caused Ruth McClain of Black World to lament Giovanni's transformation "into an almost declawed, tamed Panther with bad teeth."

Poet of the People

During the two years between the publication of 1970's Re:Creation and 1972's My House, Giovanni began to travel overseas, including her first trip to Africa. It was also during these years that she began to act on her philosophy that "poetry is the culture of a people," by "taking her poetry to the people," as Fowler concluded. Giovanni did so with the first of many sound recordings. Truth Is On Its Way was produced in collaboration with the New York Community Choir. In addition she attended numerous public readings and appearances--sometimes more than 200 in one year--including The Tonight Show on June 14, 1972, and Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall on July 25, 1972.

In an essay on black literary criticism, Margaret B. McDowell wrote that through Giovanni's public readings and appearances she truly becomes "poet of the people ... renew[ing] the tradition of the bard, prophet, or witness who sings or chants to inform the people." The poems contained in My House are suggestive of this time period in Giovanni's life; in fact, Virginia Fowler suggested that if read "as a whole" they become a "poetic autobiography" of the "first three decades" of Giovanni's life.

1978 saw the publication of what Anna T. Robinson has called her "pivotal work," Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, a volume that Robinson surmised will "mandate that she be evaluated as a poet rather than a voice for a cause." In contrast to the lightness suggested by the title, the poems in Cotton Candy are, as Martha Cook has observed, "not lighthearted or optimistic, as the positive connotations of cotton candy suggest." The same year that Cotton Candy was published, Giovanni's father had a stroke and Giovanni decided to move with her son back to her parents' home in Lincoln Heights, Ohio.

Developed Academic Side of Career

Giovanni brought out her next major volume of poetry in 1983 entitled Those Who Ride the Night Wind, dedicated to "the courage and fortitude of those who ride the night winds ... [for whom] Life is a marvelous, transitory adventure--and are determined to push us into the next century, galaxy--possibility." This volume has received mixed reviews. Fowler explained that Those Who Ride marks an "important change in poetic form" for Giovanni, a change characterized by "a new lineless form, consisting of groups of words or phrases separated by ellipses ... having the appearance of prose paragraphs." Fowler noted that this new "lineless form allows Giovanni to retain the rhythmic effects on which she, as an oral poet, has always relied" and compared the effect to a quilt, a "powerful symbol of female art and creativity."

Paula Giddings, writing in Mari Evans's Black Women Writers, however, is not as enthusiastic about Giovanni's "lineless" form and calls the collection "hollow" and filled with "fractious" thinking. Overall Giddings observed that after 1975, as Giovanni's "persona" matured, "her language, craft, and perceptions did not." Giovanni's readers, like Giddings, William J. Harris, and Haki Madhubuti, all praise the "early promise" of Giovanni's poetry. As Giddings wrote, Giovanni's "greatest challenge, as a poet, lies ahead," and Harris, also writing in Mari Evans's anthology, praised Giovanni as "one of the most talented writers to come out of the black sixties," adding that he "didn't want to lose her." As Harris concluded, "she has the talent to create good, perhaps important, poetry, if only she has the will to discipline her craft."

Between 1983 and 1996, Giovanni went on hiatus from publishing any new poetry. This did not mean that she stayed out of the public eye however, publishing essay collections such as Sacred Cows ... and Other Edibles in 1988 and Racism 101 in 1993. In 1989 Giovanni accepted a permanent position as a professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, leaving Ohio permanently for the first time since the late 1970s.

Rebounded From Serious Illness

In 1995 Giovanni made public that she had been suffering with cancer since the early 1990s and had to have numerous ribs and part of her lung removed in order to stop the spread of the disease. This accounted for her cutting back on promotional tours and for her lack of new poetry throughout most of the 1980s. It also explained to many critics and fans why she had chosen to teach and stay in a stable environment. But as Giovanni told Publishers Weekly, her choice to teach was almost inevitable, for "if you're a poet you are trying to teach. I think being in a classroom keeps you up to date. I think that you'd miss a lot if all you did was meet other writers; if you never saw another generation."

Giovanni used her time during her battle with cancer to rediscover her love of poetry and her purpose in the profession. As she commented to Jet magazine, "You get this tumor and you don't die, so you feel you have this mission." Her mission to throw herself back into the literary world was one she took very seriously. In 1996 she published two children's books, The Genie in the Jar and The Sun Is So Quiet and a year later, her first volume of poetry in fourteen years, Love Poems, hit bookstores. Like all of her previous material, it was well received by both critics and fans.

Giovanni began to do more touring as the 1990s came to a close, but remained faithful to her creative writing students at Virginia Polytechnic. She also produced another volume of poetry, Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems, in 1999, which contains poems on the subjects of nature, the little things that people look over or through everyday, as well as her personal battle with cancer. Also in 1999, she celebrated her 30th anniversary as writer, choosing to spend it with her students reading and writing poetry. The next few years were spent in the same fashion, with more public readings, but Giovanni also renewed her focus on social activism, examining the life of famous African Americans such as Tupac Shakur and Allen Iverson, as well as pushing for the exploration of space and other planets. She even spoke in front of NASA on this issue and her book Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: poems & not quite poems, which came out in 2002, dedicates much of its subject matter to the issue of African Americans being the best candidates to explore space and unknown territories. According to The America's Intelligence Wire, Giovanni compared, "the life of an astronaut going to Mars to the life of slaves on a boat--in the middle of an ocean, not knowing which way was home anymore."

Over the years, Giovanni has been canonized by many educational programs and her works have been converted into numerous media formats. She has also received a plethora of awards, ranging from the National Book Award to the NAACP Woman of the Year award. Throughout all of the changes in her life, Giovanni has remained faithful to provoking radical thought through poetry and activism, even if the methods have changed. She told the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, "Being radical in the 21st century is different from being radical in the '60s. We're a lot older now. Sometimes being radical is voting Green. Maybe we can get something done. Maybe life can be better."

Awards

Selected: Mademoiselle magazine, Highest Achievement Award, 1971; National Association of Radio and Television Announcers award, 1972, for Truth Is on Its Way; National Council of Negro Women, life membership and scroll, 1973; Cincinnati Post Post-Corbett Award, 1986; Oakland Museum Film Festival Silver Apple Award, 1988; Ohioana Library Award, 1988; Children's Reading Roundtable of Chicago Award, 1988; NAACP, Woman of the Year, 1989. Honorary degrees from numerous institutions including Fisk University, Wilberforce University, and Illinois University.

Works

Selected writings

• Poetry
• Black Feeling, Black Talk, Broadside Press, 1968, 3rd ed., 1970.
• Black Judgement, Broadside Press, 1969.
• Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, Morrow, 1970.
• Re: Creation, Broadside Press, 1970.
• Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children, Hill & Wang, 1971; rev. ed. 1985.
• My House, Morrow, 1972.
• Ego Tripping and Other Poems for Young People, Lawrence Hill, 1973.
• The Women and the Men, Morrow, 1975.
• Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, Morrow, 1978.
• Vacation Time: Poems for Children, Morrow, 1980.
• Those Who Ride the Night Winds, Morrow, 1983.
• The Genie in the Jar, Holt, 1996.
• The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1968-1995), Morrow, 1996.
• The Sun Is So Quiet, Holt, 1996.
• Love Poems, Morrow, 1997.
• Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems, Morrow, 1999.
• Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems, Morrow, 2002.
• Nonfiction
• (Editor) Night Comes Softly: An Anthology of Black Female Voices, Medic Press, 1970.
• Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet, Bobbs-Merrill, 1971; Viking, 1973; Penguin, 1976.
• (With James Baldwin) A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, Lippincott, 1972.
• (With Margaret Walker) A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker, Howard University Press, 1974.
• (Editor with Jessie Carney Smith) Images of Blacks in American Culture: A Reference Guide to Information Sources, Greenwood, 1988.
• Sacred Cows ... and Other Edibles, Morrow, 1988.
• (Editor with Cathee Dennison) Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler, Pocahontas Press, 1991.
• Racism 101, Morrow, 1993.
• (Editor) Grand Mothers: A Multicultural Anthology of Poems, Reminiscences and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Tradition, 1994.
• Sound recordings
• Truth Is on Its Way, with the New York Community Choir, Benny Diggs, director, Right-On Records, 1971.
• Like a Ripple on a Pond, with the New York Community Choir, Benny Diggs, director, NikTom, distributed by Atlantic Recording Corporation, 1973.
• The Way I Feel, with music composed by Arif Mardin. NikTom Records, distributed by Atlantic Recording Corporation, 1975.
• Legacies: The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Folkways Records, 1976.
• The Reason I Like Chocolate, Folkways Records, 1976.
• Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, Folkways Records, 1978.
• Spirit to Spirit, videocassette of PBS production, directed by Mirra Banks, produced by Perrin Ireland, 1987.
• Other
• Adaptions: Spirit to Spirit: The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, a poetry reading, produced by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ohio Council on the Arts, directed by Mirra Banks, produced by Perrin Ireland, first aired in 1986. Performances: A Signal in the Land performed with the Johnson City Symphony Orchestra, 1987.
• Contributor to numerous anthologies; author of columns "One Woman's Voice" for Anderson-Moberg Syndicate of the New York Times and "The Root of the Matter" for Encore American and Worldwide News; managing editor of and contributor to Conversation; contributor to magazines, including Black Creation, Black World, Ebony, Encore, Essence, Freedomways, Journal of Black Poetry, Negro Digest, Saturday Review of Literature, and Umbra. Editorial consultant, Encore American and Worldwide News. A selection of Giovanni's public papers are housed at Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University.

Further Reading

Books

• Authors in the News, volume 1, Gale, 1976.
• Barksdale, Richard, and Keneth Kinnamon, Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology, Macmillan, 1972.
• Children's Literature Review, volume 6, Gale, 1984.
• Christian, Barbara, Black Feminist Criticism, Pergamon, 1985.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, volume 2, 1974; volume 4, 1975; volume 9, 1981.
• Cook, Martha, "Nikki Giovanni: Place and Sense of Place in Her Poetry," Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge, U of Alabama P, 1990.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 5, part 1: American Poets Since World War II, Gale, 1980; volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955, Gale, 1985.
• Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1984.
• Fowler, Virginia C., editor, Conversations With Nikki Giovanni, U Press of Mississippi, 1992.
• Fowler, Virginia C., Nikki Giovanni, Twayne, 1992.
• Henderson, Stephen, Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Morrow, 1973.
• Lee, Don L., Dynamic Voices I: Black Poets of the 1960s, Broadside Press, 1971.
• McDowell, Margaret B., "Groundwork for a More Comprehensive Criticism of Nikki Giovanni," Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot, Penkevill Publishing Company, 1986.
• Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, Anchor/Doubleday, 1976.
• Robinson, Anna T. Nikki Giovanni: From Revolution to Revelation, State Library of Ohio, 1979.

Periodicals

• American Visions, October 1999, p. 34.
• America's Intelligence Wire, February 6, 2003.
• Black World, December 1970, pp. 102-104; January 1971; February 1971, pp. 62-64; April 1971; August 1971; August 1972, pp. 51-52; June 1973, pp. 14-21; July 1974, pp. 64-70.
• Cincinnati Enquirer Magazine, July 8, 1973; April 20, 1986, pp. 4-8.
• Ebony, February 1972; August 1972.
• Essence, August 1981; March 1994.
• Jet, May 22, 1995, p. 65.
• Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 1974, p. 11.
• Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, November 20, 2002.
• Library Journal, February 15, 1988, p. 169; November 1, 1992, p. 85.
• Mademoiselle, December 1969; May 1973; December 1973; September 1975.
• Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977), pp. 542-554.
• Negro Digest, April 1969, pp. 82-84.
• Newsweek, January 31, 1972, pp. 80-81.
• Phylon, 37 (1976), pp. 100-112.
• Publishers Weekly, November 13, 1972; May 23, 1980; December 18, 1987, p. 48; December 13, 1993, p. 54; June 28, 1999, p. 46.
• Saturday Review, January 15, 1972, p. 34.
• Time, April 6, 1970; January 17, 1972, pp. 63-64.
• Washington Post Book World, May 19, 1974; March 8, 1981; February 14, 1988, p. 3.
• Writer's Digest, February 1989, pp. 30-34.

— Mary Katherine Wainwright and Ralph G. Zerbonia

(b. 1943)

1968	Black Feeling, Black Talk. In Giovanni's self-published first book, the militancy of poems such as "The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black v. Negro," which asks "Nigger / Can you kill?" makes her a central, controversial figure of the black liberation movement. Subsequent works, however, would have a less strident tone, employing the language of blues and jazz and eventually focusing on her own domestic life.
1970	Re: Creation. The poet's third collection of black revolutionary verse includes "Ego Tripping," a celebration of the African American woman as the creator of the universe. Giovanni also edits Night Comes Softly: An Anthology of Black Female Voices.
1971	Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement of My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet. Giovanni's unconventional autobiographical reflections treat social, personal, and literary influences and positions. She also publishes Spin a Soft Black Song, her first volume of children's verse.
1972	My House. The collection marks a transition to more personal subjects and a more lyrical, introspective method. Divided into two sections--"The Rooms Inside" and "The Rooms Outside"--the arrangement suggests a dialogue between two sides of the poet's nature. Giovanni's next collection, The Women and the Men (1975), shows a similar method and concerns.
1978	Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. Giovanni's introspective collection treats loneliness and isolation and the aftermath of the loss of 1960s idealism.
1999	Blues: For All the Changes. The poet uses the blues idiom to attack racism in American life and celebrate food, friends, lovers, and family.

Quotes:

"We love because it's the only true adventure."

"Mistakes are a fact of life it is the response to error that counts."

"it's a sex object if you're pretty and no love or love and no sex if you're fat"

"There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave."

"If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else."

"White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus."

See more famous quotes by Nikki Giovanni

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