“We are the culture bearers of planet Earth,” Nikki Giovanni said in 1978 on American Black Journal, a Detroit TV program. Viewers watched the young poet, then just 36, establishing herself as part of Black American literary royalty in real time. She fielded a series of somewhat maudlin questions about creativity, Black identity, gender and politics with aplomb, her answers demonstrating her nascent wisdom and embrace of her role as a Black female writer in post-civil rights era United States.
Giovanni, who died Monday at 81 after her third battle with cancer, was one of the foremost poets who emerged from the Black arts movement of the mid-1960s. Even from her beginnings as a new artist in the movement that signified radical Black American consciousness, Giovanni always seemed aware of her singular power. Her uncanny and ferocious mind made her one of the most prolific and accomplished poets in American literature.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1943, and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni was a child of the Joshua generation, that cadre of young Black Americans radicalized by the white terrorism that led to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement. Giovanni graduated from Fisk University in Tennessee, her grandfather’s alma mater, studied history, and was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Sncc), a key arm in the civil rights movement that mobilized young people to engage in direct action against segregation.
Giovanni’s career spanned six decades – she wrote 50 books of poetry, hundreds of essays and several children’s books. Her debut poetry collection, Black Feeling, Black Talk, was self-published in 1968 and funded by her grandmother. After its success, Giovanni published her second volume, Black Judgement, which she launched at New York’s Birdland Jazz Club, drawing in a packed house and the attention of the press. Her accolades are voluminous – she was a National Book Award finalist, a Grammy nominee and a poet laureate. But, she noted, her seven NAACP Image awards were among her proudest achievements.
Giovanni also taught and mentored generations of writers, whether directly through her classes at Queens College and Virginia Tech, or indirectly through her fierce voice in poems, essays, letters and interviews. “You have children so that you can start somebody off where you have finished,” Giovanni said in 1978. “[W]hether it’s our literary children, or our physical children or our emotional children, I want somebody to be able to say: ‘OK, since Nikki learned that, I can go forward.’” She was a disruptor whose sensibilities as a writer were informed by her deep knowledge of history and the struggles of the civil rights and Black power eras. She used lyricism and poetry to capture the ups and downs of African American life in the late 20th century, providing her students a blueprint to channel language, to dream, to shake up the world.
After news of her death broke, social media spaces flooded with particular, personal and unique tributes to Giovanni. Poets and novelists, visual artists and scholars, adoring fans of all ages, all participated in a collective outpouring to mourn and celebrate Giovanni’s life. These small elegies revealed the breadth of impact she had on people’s consciousness. Many shared favorite lines and whole poems from Giovanni’s earlier oeuvre; others posted video clips of interviews from decades past in which she had used precision and wit to describe her poetic sensibility and to defend the militancy of her work. Her legacy as a public intellectual and firebrand poet will sustain her most devoted fans and continue to introduce future generations to her work.
This makes sense considering Giovanni never remained static in her writing and thinking. Her interrogations of class, gender, race and the greater American body politic only sharpened as she grew older, challenging limiting definitions of Black humanity. For instance, Ego-Tripping, one of her most famous poems, captures that buoyant feel of marrying history and the fantastic, a deeply imaginative myth-making and myth-busting that equates black womanhood with the divine. “I designed a pyramid so tough that a star/that only glows every one hundred years falls/into the center giving divine perfect light/I am bad,” one stanza reads.
The poem Nikki Rosa is just as alive and exciting in Giovanni’s recording of it as it is in her 2005 performance of it on the show Def Poetry Jam, where she was reintroduced to a younger audience who could see how emerging poets were in conversation with, if not direct inheritors of, Giovanni. “I’m fortunate that I’m a poet and have the ability to contemplate the future and look back into the past to think about the past,” Giovanni said in the 2023 HBO documentary about her life, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. “Somebody has to think the thought that has not been thought.”
Each decade after her 1968 debut, Giovanni evolved, refining her thinking around themes around love, womanhood, identity and politics without losing any of the urgency and bite of her sociopolitical critiques. Her poems ignite imaginations as much as they deliver salves to readers who recognize shared experiences of loss, rage, friendship and love.
In Reflections of April 4, 1968, a reference to the date the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr was killed, Giovanni asked: “What can I, a poor Black woman, do to destroy America?/This is a question, with appropriate variations, being asked in every Black heart.” In Adulthood (For Claudia), she contends with youthful disillusionment when one becomes aware of the world’s litany of injustices:
when I was a teen-ager i usta sit
on front steps conversing
the gym teacher’s son with embryonic eyes
about the essential essence of the universe
(and other bullshit stuff)
recognizing the basic powerlessness of me
but then I went to college where i learned
that just because everything i was was unreal
i could be real and not just real through withdrawal
into emotional crosshairs of colored bourgeois
intellectual pretensions
but from involvement with things approaching reality
i could possibly have a life
A Poem of Friendship eloquently amplifies the connections that matter: “We are not friends/because of the laughs/we spend/but the tears/we save.”
As gifted as she was in carving out these deep truths in the earthly realm, there was also an Afrofuturistic bent present in her works, most explicitly expressed in the title poem from the 2002 collection Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. In it, Giovanni speculates how interstellar travel may not be dissimilar to the strangeness the abducted African might have experienced during the transatlantic slave trade. In her capacious imagination, Black people would see the future first.
In a 2005 interview with the writer Pearl Cleage, Giovanni delivered a line that succinctly characterized her life and approach to her work. She talked about her grandmother’s influence on her early activism, and the impact of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, calling it a “declaration of war”. “We had choices,” Giovanni said. “We can tell our grandparents we can’t do it or change the world. It was way easier to change the world.”
• This article was amended on 16 December 2024. The HBO documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project was released in 2023, not 2024 as an earlier version incorrectly stated.
