Nikki Giovanni, a pioneering Black lesbian poet, essayist, and philosopher, died Dec. 9 at 81 after a lung cancer recurrence.
Tributes to Giovanni flooded social media, with notable writers, former students and others posting their meetings with her, excerpts from her poetry and performances she had given.
Giovanni was a towering figure in the Black Arts Movement as well as in the lesbian feminist movement. In the 1970s, she spent a period of time in Philadelphia studying social work at the University of Pennsylvania while also broadening her poetic reach on TV and radio.
Her final project, a documentary about her life and her fascination with space, “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” was made in Philadelphia for MAX last year. In the documentary Giovanni says, “I remember what’s important and I make up the rest. That’s what storytelling’s all about.”
A true icon
Giovanni was among our most quotable figures. Her work was as accessible as it was different from anyone else’s. She wrote a series of children’s books in addition to her collections of poetry and essays — she wanted to reach everyone with her messaging of Black love, female resilience and resistance and political action. In 2020, she wrote and performed a poem, “Vote,” where she declared herself a “thug” and said a vote says you are a citizen and that “folks vote to make us free.” It’s a dazzlingly sharp and incisive treatise on the fight for the vote that is ongoing. It is declarative of Giovanni’s breadth of political activism even at, as she notes, “77 and I hope to be 78.”
A Black lesbian voice
She self-published her first two books, “Black Feeling Black Talk” and “Black Judgment,” in 1968. Her son, Thomas, was born in 1969: “I had a baby at 25 because I wanted to have a baby and I could afford to have a baby,” she told Ebony magazine with vehemence. “I didn’t want to get married, and I could afford not to get married.” She never publicly identified the father.
For decades, Giovanni was partnered with Virginia Fowler, who she later married. Fowler was with her when she died in a Virginia hospital.
In 1987, Giovanni was recruited by Fowler to teach creative writing and literature at Virginia Tech. There, Giovanni later became a University Distinguished Professor, before retiring in 2022. And it was there that she delivered a poem to the university after the mass shooting on campus in 2007.
“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 awake to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory. Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water….We are Virginia Tech…. We will prevail.”
Giovanni frequently spoke out against hate-motivated violence. At a 1999 Martin Luther King Day event, she said of the 1998 murders of James Byrd Jr. and Matthew Shepard: “What’s the difference between dragging a Black man behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, and beating a white boy to death in Wyoming because he’s gay?”
Hers was a riveting voice and presence. From 1970, she began making regular appearances on the television program “Soul!,” an entertainment/variety/talk show that promoted Black art and culture and for which Giovanni interviewed diverse figures from Muhammed Ali to James Baldwin. She authored a memoir, “Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet,” which came out in 1971, when she was only 28.
As the New York Times reported, in 1972, when she was 29, Giovanni sold out the 1,000-plus seats at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, reading her poems alongside gospel music performed by the New York Community Choir. It was an unheard-of event. A year later she sold out all 3,000 seats at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall).
A poet. The poet.
What made Giovanni so compelling was her verve and her electric presence. She was captivating and pulled in an audience from her first words. At the beginning of her career as a writer and performer, Giovanni made herself a public intellectual — appearing on TV and talk shows and panels. She talked with other figures in the Black Arts Movement and Black civil rights movement.
One heady exchange was a two-part interview she did with Baldwin, where she laid out how the Black woman was undermined and discounted. It’s an extraordinary commentary in which Baldwin’s innate inculcated misogyny is revealed and yet Giovanni is gentle with him as she makes her case for female equality and equity.
“Two of the most important artist-intellectuals of the twentieth century were engaged in intimate communion on national television,” The New Yorker wrote of the interview.
She also co-wrote a book with Baldwin titled “A Dialogue.”
Giovanni’s love for Baldwin and his work was lasting and several months ago, she spoke at length about him for Penguin Books to celebrate the centenary of Baldwin’s birth.
The work
The early works of Giovanni are often described as “militant.” But throughout her long career, Giovanni addressed issues in her work — notably of gender and sexuality — that were always outside that of mainstream literary constructs.
Giovanni published numerous collections of poetry — from her first self-published volume, “Black Feeling Black Talk” (1968), to New York Times bestseller “Bicycles: Love Poems” (2009). She wrote several works of nonfiction and children’s literature and made multiple recordings, including the Emmy-award nominated “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection” (2004).
Her most recent publications include “Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose” (2020); “Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid” (2013); and, as editor, “The 100 Best African American Poems” (2010). She also published more than two dozen volumes of poetry, essays, and edited anthologies and 11 illustrated children’s books, including “Rosa,” an award-winning biography of Rosa Parks.
Giovanni received numerous awards, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the inaugural Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Award, the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, the Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts, the Emily Couric Leadership Award, a Literary Excellence Award. She was a seven-time recipient of the NAACP Image Award. Her autobiography, Gemini, was a finalist for the 1973 National Book Award. In 2004, her album, “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection,” was a Grammy finalist for Best Spoken Word Album.
The marriage
When she spoke at the premiere of “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project” at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Giovanni spoke briefly about the isolation of being a writer. But she also spoke about her long marriage to Virginia “Ginnie” Fowler, who first brought her to Virginia Tech, then became her biographer, partner and wife.
Beandrea July writes about how in the documentary “Giovanni is able to speak about being a lesbian without shame. In a scene that takes place in a church pulpit, she hypothesizes the extinction of the penis, while also affirming her marriage to fellow academic Virginia Fowler: ‘I’m very fortunate to have somebody who loves me. I don’t care what anybody has to say about it.’ Fowler is interviewed in the film and we see Giovanni give her a sheepish peck on the cheek in their kitchen.”
Queer writer Hilton Als noted in the New York Times that Giovanni’s commentary on Black love and Black cohesion and family “was a voice you didn’t hear a lot then, this desire for home.”
Als referenced hearing Giovanni read her poem “My House” in the early 1970s. “Later, as she ditched the Black nationalist rhetoric, she became more herself. She was saying something really profound to me, a member of the gay community and the Black world and whatever. She was the first warrior in terms of talking about queer love — not specifically, but it was there.”
Black love, lesbian love, gender and sexuality, political action and historical crimes against Black people and women — these were the subjects about which Giovanni dedicated her decades of writing and speaking. She leaves a lasting legacy that is long, complex, foundational and not a little incendiary.
There are more readings on Nikki Giovanni’s website nikki-giovanni.com and a series of her poems and prose on The Poetry Foundation at poetryfoundation.org.