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Title: Nikki Giovanni, 2008
Source: the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
More informationNikki Giovanni is a poet, civil rights activist, and outspoken social critic—particularly on
issues of gender and race—who uses her poetry as a vehicle for political commentary. Her self-published first
volume of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), declared an affinity to the Black
Power of Malcolm X and dismissed the nonviolence of Martin Luther King Jr. "We ain't got to prove we can die,"
she wrote. "We got to prove we can kill." While her militancy has tempered with the years, her commitment to
the importance of individual black voices in opposition to what she perceives to be the powerful and
corrupting influence of the "white race" has not wavered. Giovanni's fame and influence, meanwhile, have
grown. Currently, she is a University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University (or Virginia Tech), where she spoke
prominently following the April 2007 shooting in which a Tech student murdered thirty-two people.
Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee. The second daughter of Yolande Cornelia and Jones "Gus" Giovanni, she was first called Nikki by her older sister, Gary Ann. Shortly after her birth, Giovanni moved with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her parents found jobs at a black boys' school. Giovanni often spent summers with her grandparents in Knoxville and, because of a stormy relationship with her parents, lived with her grandparents for some time during high school. The racial tensions of the 1950s South, combined with her grandmother Emma Louvenia Watson's social activism, undoubtedly shaped Giovanni's future politics.
Title: Nikki Giovanni recites
"Pole Beans"
More informationIn 1960, Giovanni entered Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, but her growing and vocal involvement in
what she called the "revolution" of the civil rights movement led to her expulsion in February 1961. After
spending the next three years helping her family, working, and taking classes in Cincinnati, Giovanni was
readmitted to Fisk in 1964 by a new dean.
While at Fisk, Giovanni met influential black poets such as Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) and became involved in the Black Arts Movement, a branch of the early Black Power Movement. Started by Baraka in 1960s Harlem, the Black Arts Movement called for African Americans to break from the white-dominated publishing industry and start their own publishing houses, magazines, and journals dedicated to the African American experience. On campus, Giovanni edited a student literary journal and established a chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a national campus-based organization that was a major player in the civil rights movement.
After graduating from Fisk in 1967, Giovanni moved back to Cincinnati, where, following her grandmother's death, she wrote many of the poems that would comprise her first volume. She also continued to be involved in the civil rights movement and met several influential leaders and artists while organizing Cincinnati's first Black Arts Festival.
In 1967, Giovanni briefly enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work. During that time, she borrowed money to self-publish Black Feeling, Black Talk, a collection that did not urge violence so much as accept its possibility. Poems like "The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro" openly addressed racial issues with a combination of fury and frustration, passion and poignancy.
Title: Nikki Giovanni and
Julian Bond at the Virginia
Civil Rights Memorial
Dedication
Source: the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
More informationAfter receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Giovanni moved to New York City and
enrolled in the master of fine arts program at Columbia University, where she continued her writing and, at
the end of 1968, self-published a second volume of poems, Black Judgement. In 1969,
Thomas A. Johnson described Giovanni's writing as "basically angry" in a New York
Times article titled "Renaissance in Black Poetry Expresses Anger." He also noted that she outdrew
even singer James Brown at a mid-Manhattan record store. "Black poets are talking about getting basic
changes so that they can exist in the society," Giovanni told the paper. "They are talking about getting
something of their own."
In August 1969, Giovanni gave birth to her only child, Thomas Watson, and in September began teaching at Rutgers University. In the years following, she was a regular guest on the television show Soul!, she republished her first two books of poetry as a single volume, and she published a third, Re:creation (1970). Her poetry has always found its roots in the oral tradition, and she has recorded numerous spoken-word albums, including The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, which was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2004.
In 1989, Giovanni accepted a permanent teaching position at Virginia Tech and relocated to Blacksburg. As poets go, she has become quite famous and even mainstream. Rather than "basically angry," she is now "exquisitely angry," according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. She is the "Princess of Black Poetry," according to the New York Times, and, to quote the Washington Post, a "venerable lioness." But after student Cho Seung-Hui committed the deadliest school shooting in American history on April 16, 2007, she had occasion to write some of her most famous lines.
Title: Nikki Giovanni: "We are
Virginia Tech!"
More informationAt one point, Cho had been one of Giovanni's students, and she and her class became so alarmed at the
violence in his writing and at his demeanor that she expelled him from her class. She told CNN, "I was
willing to resign before I would continue with him … It was the meanness." At a convocation of students and
faculty after the killings, Giovanni read "We Are Virginia Tech," a poem she composed on her home computer
the night before. "We are brave enough to bend and cry," she told a crowd of ten thousand, "and sad enough
to know we must laugh again." She ended by insisting, "We will prevail," repeating the line four times
before intoning, "We are Virginia Tech." A standing ovation followed as the crowd performed what the
Baltimore Sun called "a chant of collective hope": "Let's go Hokies!"
Today, the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University holds Giovanni's collected papers, which include fourteen volumes of poetry, eight children's books, twelve collections of essays and conversations, and nine spoken-word recordings. She has also received twenty-two honorary degrees from colleges and universities across the country.
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