Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and public speaker who went from borrowing money to release her first book to spending decades as a literary celebrity who shared blunt and conversational takes on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality, has died. She was 81.
Giovanni, subject of the prize-winning 2023 documentary Going to Mars, died Monday with her lifelong partner, Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, by her side, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson.
“We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin,” said Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni’s cousin, in a statement on behalf of the family.
The author of more than 25 books, Giovanni was a born confessor and performer whom fans came to know well from her work, readings and other live appearances and her years on the faculty of Virginia Tech, among other schools. Poetry collections such as Black Judgement and Black Feeling Black Talk sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from The Tonight Show and other television programs and made her popular enough to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for a celebration of her 30th birthday.
In poetry, prose and the spoken word, she told her story. She looked back on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, addressed her battles with lung cancer, paid tribute to heroes from Nina Simone to Angela Davis and reflected on such personal passions as food, romance, family and rocketing into space — a journey she believed Black women uniquely qualified for, if only because of how much they had already survived. She also edited a groundbreaking anthology of Black women poets, Night Comes Softly, and helped found a publishing cooperative that promoted works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker among others.
For a time, she was called “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,” her friend Barbara Crosby wrote in the introduction to The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni, an anthology of nonfiction prose published in 2003.
“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 ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who name-checked her on the dance hit Square Biz, to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her Living Legends summit in 2005, when other guests of honour included Rosa Parks and Toni Morrison. Giovanni was a National Book Award finalist in 1973 for a prose work about her life, Gemini. She also received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.
In January 2009, at the request of NPR, she wrote 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 never married the father, because, she told Ebony magazine, “I didn’t want to get married, and I could afford not to get married.” Over the latter part of her life she lived with her partner, Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech.
She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was soon called “Nikki” by her older sister. She was four when her family moved to Ohio and eventually settled in the Black community of Lincoln Heights, outside Cincinnati. She would travel often between Tennessee and Ohio, bound to her parents and to her maternal grandparents in her “spiritual home” in Knoxville.
As a girl, she read everything from history books to Ayn Rand and was accepted to Fisk University, the historically Black school in Nashville, after her junior year of high school.
College was a time for achievement, and for trouble. Her grades were strong, she edited the Fisk literary magazine and helped start the campus branch of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. But she rebelled against school curfews and other rules and was kicked out for a time because her “attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman,” she later wrote. After the school changed the dean of women, Giovanni returned and graduated with honours in history in 1967.
Giovanni relied on support from friends to publish her debut collection, Black Poetry Black Talk, which came out in 1968, and in the same year she self-published Black Judgement. The radical Black Arts Movement was at its height and early Giovanni poems such as A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why, Of Liberation and A Litany for Peppe were militant calls to overthrow white power. (“The worst junkie or black businessman is more humane/than the best honkie”).
“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 opposition to the political system moderated over time, although she never stopped advocating for change and self-empowerment, or remembering martyrs of the past. In 2020, she was featured in an ad for presidential candidate Joe Biden, in which she urged young people to “vote because someone died for you to have the right to vote.”
In January, an HBO documentary came out that follows Giovanni’s rise as an artist. Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project tracks every milestone in the renowned poet’s life, from her big break at Birdland Jazz Club in New York City, to her legendary conversations with James Baldwin, to her surprising interest in space travel and her dream of going to the moon.
Q53:59Nikki Giovanni, Zarrar Kahn
Considered one of the world’s greatest living poets, Nikki Giovanni carved out a revolutionary legacy during the civil rights era with poems that uplifted the experiences of Black Americans. Decades later, Nikki’s writing and interviews have grown increasingly personal, offering insight into her childhood, health struggles and thoughts on growing older. She shares her story in the new documentary, “Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.” Nikki tells Tom about being involved in the birth of hip-hop, why artists should go to space, and how she packed a club of 100 people, including guests like Morgan Freeman and Nina Simone.
For his debut feature film, “In Flames,” the Pakistani Canadian filmmaker Zarrar Kahn pulls inspiration from his experience living in Karachi as a child. The film is about a mother and daughter who are trying to survive in Karachi as they deal with the challenging reality — and often horror — of living in a patriarchal society. Zarrar speaks with Tom about the film, what it was like confronting his childhood memories, and where his idea for the story originally came from.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Q‘s Tom Power, Giovanni discussed all this and more, but she also had a lot to say about talent — what it means to have it and what she makes of her own.
Giovanni said she turned to writing precisely because she didn’t have any talent.
“Don’t laugh, Tom,” she said. “What I got early on in terms of aptitude was that I didn’t have an aptitude for anything else. I couldn’t play the piano, I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance, I’m not athletic. When you can’t do anything else, you turn to art, you turn to writing. If you talked to any of the writers, you found out they were all useless. And so what do you do? You watch the people who do, and then you write about the people who are doing the things that perhaps you even wish you could do.”
Her best known work came early in her career; the 1968 poem Nikki-Rosa. It was a declaration of her right to define herself, a warning to others (including obituary writers) against telling her story and a brief meditation on her poverty as a girl and the blessings, from holiday gatherings to bathing in “one of those big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in,” which transcended 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”
