Editor’s Note: Nikki Giovanni died December 9, 2024.
God made Nikki Giovanni for sisters like me: overly sensitive, shy, and precocious little Black girls with pigtails and big ideas; soon-to-be-sassy Black girls outgrowing our small Midwestern hometowns.
When I was 6 or 7, living in Hamilton and watching my parents bust up and my comfortable world right along with them, grown Black folks uttered Nikki Giovanni’s name with the same reverence Black Baby Boomers of Giovanni’s own generation still use now. As if “Nikki Giovanni” is slang or code for something else. Or simply an adjective, or even punctuation. Like: Nikkee. Giovaahnee. Period.
Illustration by Sara Cumings
It was no small feat for Giovanni’s name to join the ranks of Famous Negro Writers Trotted Out for Black History Month: Paul Laurence Dunbar, magician of Black dialect; Langston Hughes, prince scribe of everyday Black language; Alice Walker, Earth Mother/co-opted feminist; and Maya Angelou, first to popularize the assumed supernatural strengths of Black women. But it was Giovanni who emerged as the “Princess of Black Poetry,” according to editor Ida Lewis in her foreword to Giovanni’s 1972 poetry collection My House. Giovanni is a survivor of the decade-long Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, and she’s a descendant of the Harlem Renaissance a generation before. She is a prolific poet, essayist, children’s author, and recording artist. Her awards and honors run for pages—starting with an honorary doctorate from Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio, bestowed on her in April 1972, an occasion she punctuated with loving profanity. “See what my motherfuckers got me!” she exclaimed to the crowd, and to her father’s chagrin.
More recent accolades tell the tale of her longevity and relevance. In 2005, the same year her mother, Yolande Cornelia, died—or “just shut down,” as she tells it—Giovanni was anointed one of Oprah Winfrey’s “25 Living Legends.” And in 2006 she returned here to her hometown to fete the 20th anniversary of the Taft Museum of Art’s prestigious Duncanson Artist-in-Residence program, which she helped launch in 1986 when the staid museum tapped her as the inaugural artist.
Giovanni has endured well past the shelf life of the average American poet of her generation. The prestige of her tenured university post is not an excuse to rest on past laurels. She just keeps writing because, she says, “That’s what writers do.” Lately, though, it feels like she’s writing for her life. Last April, she was still reeling from the death of her mother and sister when the massacre at Virginia Tech, where she’s one of the university’s 14 Distinguished Professors, nearly brought her to her knees. Giovanni dug in, determined not to be felled by grief, terror, and any further loss of identity. She wasn’t cheerleading when she exclaimed the fateful words “We are Virginia Tech!” to the students, faculty, and alumni that filled the 10,000-seat Cassell Coliseum in Blacksburg, Virginia. She needed to hear those words as much as she needed to say them. She needed to know she was alive and hopeful. And still fearless.
Giovanni blasted her way into the New York literary community in 1968 after borrowing money to self-publish Black Feeling Black Talk. It was an impatient, insistent, soulful wail that became her literary calling card. Her poetry may have been some of the most polished to emerge during this era, when America’s ghettos belched forth reams of Black Power verse. Writing about this new genre (“Renaissance in Black Poetry Expresses Anger,” April 25, 1969), The New York Times deemed Giovanni “the only attraction to outdraw James Brown” at a Manhattan club and described Black Judgment, her second collection, as a “basically angry anthology.” But Giovanni’s prowess with words gave her staying power, and she outlasted the gaggle of Black voices with whom she’d been assigned membership by the mainstream media.
Photograph by Barron Claiborne
Because she is blunt and plainspoken, Giovanni was—and still is—labeled angry and even hateful. “This has been a career that I said what I thought should be said,” she tells me by phone from her kitchen in Virginia. “And I’m not arrogant. Actually, I’m polite. I like people and I remember reading 40 years ago, ‘Nikki Giovanni hates…’ and I said ‘Oh that’s not gonna happen and I don’t [hate] and I’m not bitter.’ ”
Not everyone likes Giovanni or her poetry and that’s OK with her because Giovanni does not like everyone or what they do, either. These are a few of her least favorite people at the moment: Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, J. Kenneth Blackwell. “I just believe, you know”—she gets going now—“you have to call a motherfucker a motherfucker, and I’m gonna do it.” She laughs a raspy laugh. Giovanni’s outspokenness is, in her mind, a genealogical responsibility to say what she believes is the right thing—regardless of how scabrous it may sound to the rest of us.
Over the years, Giovanni has worn her Blackness like a uniform and spoken her truths with casually devastating force. In photographs from the late ’60s she is skinny with a large Afro, dressed sometimes in dashiki-like garb, sometimes in T-shirts and jeans. Back then she looked boyish and serious, delicate and vulnerable. To some extent, she still does. In those days, she patiently explained every part of herself—even her name—duly earning a reputation for her quick, acerbic wit. A Times reporter once asked about the origin of her last name. “We had an Italian slave master,” she quipped. In “To Be A Poet,” a Mademoiselle profile from December 1969, Giovanni did as she still does. She de-mystified poetry, counting everyday people—not other writers—as her influence. “I’m responding to the community,” she said then. “We are all poets. I just write poems.”
With her name-brand recognition and her knack for incendiary truth-talking, Giovanni’s name still evokes anxious responses. As she sees it, the role of the American poet remains the same as it did 40 years ago. “Poetry has always been a bellwether and it always will be,” she explains. “I can’t imagine a world where there’s not at least on good poet saying things like, ‘You people suck.’ There are always gonna be the poets that are sycophants and we know that. ‘Oh, the king is alright, why are you picking on the king?’ ” she says, affecting a high, whiny voice. “But the king needs to be picked on. And that’s what poets do.”
At 64, Giovanni still has the rocket fuel and the stiff spine of a literary missile. And she has blasted off a couple of times in the past year and a half. Inspired by Maya Angelou’s reading of “On the Pulse of Morning” at the Clinton inauguration in 1993, 3CDC’s Bill Donabedian invited Giovanni to town in October 2006 to christen the redesigned Fountain Square. She offered “I am Cincinnati,” a straight-forward, name-checking litany of geographical landmarks like Eden Park, Findlay Market, and “the seven hills.” The poem meanders like a lazy Sunday afternoon car tour through the Queen City until Giovanni declares: “I am not a son of a bitch like Kenny Blackwell…I will not sell my soul for ambition…I am not a political whore…”
Some in attendance were shocked and dismayed, and subsequent editorials inferred Giovanni’s civic disloyalty. “If I had known that it was gonna be controversial,” she explains, “I would never have booked myself out. I don’t run from controversy. I called Kenny Blackwell a son of a bitch…I didn’t see that as anything other than, you know, a Nikki poem. I was just amazed. Like oh God, how did I get into this one?”
Last April she again called on her “I am” trope. Only this time it was We are—and the occasion she was marking was a bloodbath that left the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University stunned.
On the morning of April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate at the university, where Giovanni has taught creative writing since 1987, shot and killed 32 students and then himself in a horrific massacre. The next day at a university-wide convocation, Giovanni became the poet-spokeswoman for her academic home, offering a rousing and emotional call to survival. Giovanni gave all rights to the poem to the university; it’s posted permanently on the school’s website. “I think that ‘We Are’ was also a healing for the loss of my mother,” she told me. “I’m not gonna lose my mother and my school and my identity, so there was not an ‘I am’ there, there was a we are.”
Giovanni was indirectly involved in the tragedy. Even before the shooter was identified, she guessed who was responsible. She was on a delayed US Airways flight from San Francisco via Charlotte that April morning, when a Virginia Tech student sitting behind her turned on her cell phone and learned about the shootings on campus. When Giovanni reached the terminal, banks of TVs tuned to CNN trumpeted the bad news. By the time she got home there were calls from friends all over the country. “I’m answering the same questions: I don’t know. I just got in. I don’t know, I don’t know,” she says. “But I did. My friend from Cincinnati, he called and I said, ‘John, I know who’s doing this.’ ” Her gut told her it was Seung-Hui Cho. In fall 2005, Giovanni had him removed from her creative writing class because the rest of her students were so disturbed by his morbid and mean poems and his off-putting demeanor.
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger asked Giovanni to write something to anchor the grief-addled convocation the following day. Part affirmation, part chant, “We Are Virginia Tech” joins the Giovanni canon of poetic reportage. It reads, in part:
We are Virginia Tech.
We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands, being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.
We are Virginia Tech.
…
We are the Hokies.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We are Virginia Tech.
And she continues to write. Giovanni will launch three children’s books this year. The grasshopper sues the ant in The Grasshopper’s Song—her take on Aesop’s Fables, which came out last month. Bryan Collier illustrates her telling of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: An American Friendship, slated for fall release. Also in the fall, she’ll publish Hip Hop Speaks to Children. In it, Giovanni uses poetry, illustration, a CD, and Val Gray Ward’s interpretation of James Weldon Johnson’s sermon “The Creation” to connect the cultural dots between the fervid Pentecostal worship of the Holiness Church and hip-hop. Though all her family in Cincinnati have passed away (father Jones “Gus” Giovanni died in 1982, and sister Gary Ann died six weeks after her mother in 2005) she still calls “Cinsuhnattuh” home. She even came here for treatment at Jewish Hospital when, at 50, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Two months after she was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr., on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee, her father moved the family to his hometown. When her sister inexplicably started calling young Yolande “Nikki,” the name stuck.
To me, the name Nikki Giovanni is synonymous with: 1) the pain truth, and 2) plain language. At first blush the simplicities of her poems are a world apart from the highbrow poetry my generation was force-fed in high school and college. We didn’t need decoder rings to read Giovanni’s work. When, on my own, I read—no, discovered—“Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” my junior year in high school, I was bowled over by the confidence and the self-made history of lines like this:
I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
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
Giovanni deflated the stuffiness of poetry with work that was deceptively simple yet sometimes seething in its questioning of power and always wistful in its lamentations for her/our dead Black heroes. She leaves that indelible Giovanni poetic DNA spread across everything she touches. Embrace or dismiss her, Nikki came. She saw. She wrote. She spoke the words.
Isn’t that what poets do?
Sometime around junior high school I started more frequently hearing and reading about Giovanni. A few years later, her iconoclastic and self-loving persona would be profoundly inspirational to me. By then, my blended family and I lived in Forest Park but attended Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Glendale, where my mother was minister of music. That put me close to, but a generation removed from, Giovanni’s old neighborhood just down Springfield Pike from Glendale—Woodlawn and Lincoln Heights, two historically Black enclaves where the poet grew up.
At 17 she enrolled in Fisk University, where she was expelled for leaving campus without the permission of the dean of women. She’d gone to spend Thanksgiving with her grandparents in Knoxville; when she returned, she was promptly ejected. Back home in Cincinnati, she lived with her parents, took classes at UC, and worked at Walgreens. Re-admitted to Fisk in 1964, she graduated with honors in 1967 with a history degree.
Her maternal grandmother died soon after, and Giovanni consoled herself by writing the poems that came to comprise Black Feeling Black Talk. The following year she received an NEA grant, dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work, and moved to New York.
There was a decades-long spate of high-profile appearances, readings, collaborations, and awards. When she came back to Cincinnati for speaking gigs, there were standing-room-only crowds, and when she was home just for fellowship, they’d be excited talk of Nikki sightings at grocery and department stores.
Growing up, I didn’t have any tales of Six Degrees of Nikki Separation. Ours was—and remains—a one-sided literary admiration society. As a high school junior in 1982, I had an inkling I wanted to be a writer, but my command of the cliché was stronger than the discipline to write. That is, until I started stealing the paperbacks of my favorite authors. I waltzed into bookstores with Baldwin, Kafka, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Dostoyevsky, and—soon—Giovanni flashing across my subconscious like soft-focus neon. I stole her book The Women and the Men with impunity, slipping it into my pocket at a B. Dalton Bookseller like a had rights to it. Once home, I boldly wrote my full name and the date—Kathy Yvonne Wilson Nov. 19, 1982—on the inside cover.
Giovanni laughs uproariously when I tell her this. “Good for you,” she says, “Good for you. I’d rather you stole them than not have them.”
I recall the advice Giovanni gave, at 26, speaking to young Black poets in that Mademoiselle article, imploring them to “listen to our own Black hearts.” When Giovanna listens to hers, she must hear freedom of speech answering back.
Giovanni muses openly now about mortality. “The Giovannis have been on my heart lately,” she says, “they all die just about the time they’re 65. And I’m 64. [My mother’s family] live forever, so I’m pulling for my Watson genes.”
Looking back now on the long journey of her life she says her family was happy when she “officially” became a writer because “families are happy if you’re happy.”
“I said, ‘This is what I do. I write books.’ My father, I called him Gus, used to send me a check when I first started this. We didn’t get along very well. I was quite touched. I was home one time [when] I was living in New York, just as I was having Thomas”—her only child, born in August 1969. “So I’m getting these checks from my father and I’m wondering why? He says, ‘You got the boy now and you might have some expenses.’ And it hit me: He thinks I can’t earn a living.”
By that time Giovanni was already a best-selling author. One day, she intentionally left her royalty statement on the table so Gus could see it. “He said, ‘Is that for you?’ ” she recalls. “ ‘You’re doing all right. You don’t need my money.’ ” It was the only way some Black fathers—like my own—show emotion: through provision.
She is blunt when I ask if her relationship with Gus was terse, something I’d gleaned from her writing.
“He was abusive,” she says. “He’d be hitting my mother and stuff. As we got older we worked through it. But ‘terse’ would be one word for it.”
I realize I should not twin myself to Nikki Giovanni. That’s dangerous. Nevertheless, there are these parallel realities: Our mothers died one month apart; we’ve both had emotionally distant fathers; we’re both known for our big mouths and our bigger opinions. When I was a columnist, some old-heads called me “Our next Nikki,” a tag I winced at while dodging the temptation to rip off her blunt style.
Four years ago, when my book publisher asked me whom I’d like to get a jacket blurb from, I began stalking Giovanni myself. First, by phone. Then, in person. I followed her to her car after a signing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. I asked nervously. She kept her word and sent the blub along. Now, when I inscribe books to readers, I often write “Black love is Black wealth,” a line from one of her poems.
No part of my writing life could have happened if not for the literal and geographical nearness of Nikki Giovanni. After all, we come from the same place. And that place feels like a poem.
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