feature image photo by Jackson State University / Contributor via Getty Images

On Monday, it was reported that Nikki Giovanni — internationally recognized poet and leader in the Black Arts Movement who urged us to believe in and fight for a world without the limits of systemic racism and injustice — lost her third battle with cancer at the age of 81.

It feels impossible to try to encapsulate the immense influence that Giovanni and her work brought into the world over the course of her incredible life. In response to the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement of 1960s and 1970s, Giovanni, along with Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Amiri Baraka, and others, helped forged new pathways to publication and celebration for Black artists of all kinds in the U.S. and created new cultural institutions to showcase their work and provide support for Black artists who needed it. As she organized with others in the Black Arts Movement and, eventually, other queer Black women writers, Giovanni published prolifically, putting out a new collection of poetry, children’s book, or record nearly every year for over a decade. Her first collection of poems published in 1968, Black Feelings Black Talk, not only established her as a one of the most important artists within the movement but also helped her work reach new audiences and cement her as one of the most important American poets. In it, she wrote about the intersections of love, radical politics, race, and the realities of existing as a Black woman poet in an oppressive and unwelcoming society.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee on June 7, 1943, Giovanni spent the majority of her early childhood in the suburbs surrounding Cincinnati, Ohio before returning to Tennessee to move in with her grandmother after the tensions between her grandparents became too much for her to handle. She went on to attend Fisk University, the same university her grandfather attended. After initially being unjustly expelled from Fisk for clashing with the university’s Dean of Women at the time, Giovanni was eventually asked back to Fisk, where she majored in history and took writing classes with Fisk’s writer-in-residence, the novelist John Oliver Killens. Her involvement in Killens’s workshops led her to attend the First Writers Conference at Fisk in 1966 where she met Dudley Randall and Amiri Baraka, writers she would soon organize with in the Black Arts Movement. During her time at Fisk, she also helped reinstate Fisk’s chapter of the radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, edited Fisk’s student literary journal Èlan, and published works in Negro Digest.

After graduating from Fisk in 1967, Giovanni moved to New York City to pursue an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. While there, she published Black Feelings Black Talk, and her writing career began to take off after its publication. By the early 1970s, Giovanni was frequently a guest on the WNET public television show SOUL!, where she was invited on as a guest to speak with other prominent Black artists and writers. Her involvement with the show led to the legendary two hour conversation between her and James Baldwin in 1971 that is often clipped and shared on social media every couple of months. The conversation touched on a lot of the commonalities the two writers share in regards to their experiences as Black artists, the similarities of their childhoods, Black love and partnership, and their beliefs in using arts as tool for advancing radical political possibilities while also showcasing the gender-oppressive and misogynistic aspects Giovanni believed people in the Black Arts, Civil Rights, and Black Power movement often ignored. Her sharpness in their conversation managed to gag James Baldwin in a way I’ve never seen in any other footage and, in retrospect, is a wildly accurate showcase of how she would take on the world of arts and letters for her entire career.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Giovanni continued to publish poetic works and works for children. In 1987, she was prompted by the woman who would eventually become her wife, Virginia Fowler, to join the English department faculty at Virginia Technical University, where she worked and taught until the fall of 2022. Over the course of her decades-spanning career, she often made herself available in a variety of ways including public talks, appearances at book and culture festivals, and through programs like All Arts “Write Around the Corner.” In 2023, a gorgeous and expertly crafted documentary about her life, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, was produced by HBOMax, and features a ton of archival footage of Giovanni working over the last 50 years as well interviews with people who are close to her and love her.

In the documentary, Giovanni explains “The one thing that I did know is that whatever life would be, I knew I had to create myself,” which perfectly explains the way Giovanni moved through the world for her entire life. A fierce advocate for Black art and Black artists, an unapologetic hip hop fan who had a replica of Tupac’s “Thug Life” tattoo put on her own body, a woman who never suffered under the weight of others’ opinions about her, and a person who truly believed we could change the world through everyday acts of radical mercy and love, Giovanni understood more than most that it was our duty to both create a world worth living in and to celebrate the beauties present in the one we currently have simultaneously. Her poetry, particularly one of her most famous poems, “Nikki-Rosa,” exemplified this wholly but so did everything she did in her life beyond her written work. She lived by example and wasn’t afraid to tell people when they were derelict of their duty to one another.

This year, while fighting this third and final cancer diagnosis, Giovanni continued to work and write poetry with a final collection of poems called The Last Book coming out next year. Perhaps more importantly, though, not even getting older and fighting illness could pry Giovanni away from what she viewed as her biggest and most imperative responsibility: standing up for what is right “even when the shit hits the fan.” While doing press for the documentary’s release at the beginning of this year, Giovanni said in an interview with Oxford American, “I think the transgender kids are the bravest kids right now that we see; they’re as brave as my generation was in breaking down segregation. They’re breaking down—I don’t have the word for it right now—but it’s gender prejudice, and [the idea that] somebody has decided that they can tell you who you are, what your name should be, and how you should look. […] I think the transgender students are really brave because they’re taking a lot of flack for just wanting to be themselves and to have the right to have their own name. I think that’s incredibly brave, and I think that they’re absolutely right to want to do that. To want to own themselves.”

Then, in March of this year, alongside Doreen St. Félix, Giovanni cancelled a much publicized PEN America-sponsored appearance at the Brooklyn Museum in response to both PEN America’s and the museum’s stances on the genocide in Palestine. St. Félix and Giovanni put out a joint statement on Instagram the day before the event writing they had “withdrawn from the program in response to the refusal of both PEN America and Brooklyn Museum to stand in solidarity with people of Palestine and against genocide.”

I first encountered Nikki Giovanni performing “Nikki Rosa” on a late-night rerun of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam at some point during high school, and I remember being immediately hooked by her cadence and the way she used such accessible language to send much more complicated and nuanced messages. At that moment, I could’ve never expected that so much of her work would continue to rattle in the back of my head for the rest of my adult life, but she has remained a figure I’m constantly looking up to for guidance and strength as I continue pushing forward in my own “duties” and responsibilities. Her loss is as immense as her impact, but I also think it’s important to celebrate the fact that she was with us for so long and that she lived a beautiful life she conjured and built through her determination to hold joy as close to her as she possibly can. I’m sure that more than anything, she’d want us to remember she lives on forever through her work, so I’ll end this with one of my favorite of her poems, “Revolutionary Dreams”:

i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i’d be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she’s natural
i would have a revolution

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