Nikki Giovanni is an American poet whose work has made her one of the most important and renowned poets alive today. Giovanni was born on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was raised near Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1960, Giovanni entered Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville. Soon, however, she began to clash with the university's Dean of Women over some of the university's rules, which Giovanni believed to be overly conservative. In February of 1961, after returning home for Thanksgiving without receiving the appropriate permission and then arguing with the Dean of Women about the university's rules, Giovanni was expelled. She returned to Cincinnati to work, take classes at the University of Cincinnati, and help take care of her nephew, Christopher, until the fall of 1964, when the arrival of a new dean to Fisk allowed her to re-enroll at the university.
After graduating from Fisk in January 1967, Giovanni moved back to Cincinnati. The death in March of her grandmother, Louvenia Watson, caused Giovanni to begin writing as a way of dealing with the intense emotions she experienced while grieving. In 1967, Giovanni wrote many of the poems that would make up her 1968 collection Black Feeling Black Talk. Giovanni would spend the next several years writing, organizing, and teaching. In the 1970s, she made several appearances on the television program Soul!, which highlighted Black art and culture. Giovanni became a key figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a movement which emphasized Black pride and liberation.
Giovanni's output since 1970 has been prolific, often crossing genres and forms. Her work, whose focus spans from politics to race and identity to explorations of the self, has been widely acclaimed and massively successful. Giovanni has been the recipient of seven NAACP Image Awards, a Grammy nomination, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Dedication and Commitment to Service, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, multiple Woman of the Year awards, the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters, the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award, and the Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award, among many other honors. She also had a celebrated teaching career at Virginia Tech, where she taught English from 1987 to 2022. Giovanni was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech and only the fifth recipient of the Ut Prosim Scholar Award, the university's top honor for faculty.
Nikki Giovanni is considered a top African-American poet of the twentieth century. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee during 1943 and was raised in a family of strong African-American heritage. She gained popularity during the 1960s and...
“Nikki-Rosa” is a free-verse poem first published in Nikki Giovanni's 1968 collection Black Judgement. The poem, which is autobiographical in nature, discusses Giovanni's childhood near Cincinnati, Ohio. The poem addresses the public perception of...
