Nikki Giovanni, one of the most influential and celebrated poets and activists of our time, left an indelible mark on literature with her powerful, poignant works that explored themes of love, social justice, and personal identity.
Born on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tenn., she graduated from Fisk University and later studied at Columbia University. Giovanni created strongly written poems to convey messages of love, frustration, alienation, and the black experience. She was a prolific writer, authoring over 20 poetry collections and 15 children’s books. Her first book of poetry, Black Feeling Black Talk/Black Judgement, heralded her as a prominent voice of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements with poems such as “Nikki/Rosa” about the depth of Black love.
Giovanni would go on to win numerous awards for her writing, including the American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award for her collection Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. Giovanni has been the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford Foundation. She has taught English at Rutgers University, Ohio State University, and Queens College and has given frequent poetry readings. She is also known for several sound recordings of her poetry, including Truth Is On Its Way. She has also been a Professor of English at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, from where she retired in 2022 after 25 years.
As we remember Giovanni’s remarkable legacy following her passing on December 9 (at the age of 81), here is a list of some of her works including children’s books available with your Livingston Library card, that offer a unique glimpse into her eloquent voice and profound vision. * The starred titles are available in other BCCLS libraries.
This collection of eighty poems is distinctly Nikki Giovanni, but different. Not softened, but more inspired by love, celebration, memories and even nostalgia. She aims her intimate and sparing words at family and friends, the deaths of heroes and friends, favorite meals and candy, nature, libraries, and theatre. But in between, the deep and edgy conscience that has defined her for decades shines through when she writes about Rosa Parks, hurricane Katrina, and Emmett Till’s disappearance, leaving no doubt that Nikki has not traded one approach for another, but simply made room for both.
Homey and worldly, funny and jazzy, these nimble love lyrics move from the routine cooking, housework, football, a howling heart, bodily woes to the miraculous (bliss), because Giovanni is a trickster and a sage who folds a lifetime of feelings and discoveries into each poised, swinging, and heartfelt line.
Blues : for All the Changes : New Poems *
Matching her powerful voice to the supple cadence of the blues, a perfect vehicle for irony, Giovanni hammers away at the racism that continues to warp and strangle American life, but she writes of pleasure, too, of good food and good friends, lovers and family. Agile and spirited, she relishes sports metaphors and tough language. She sings out in praise of the civil rights movement and its innovative and gutsy poets and presents tributes to black soldiers, Jackie Robinson, and Betty Shabazz. Many of her poems take the form of monologues that make the leap from the merely annoying to the unjust, the ordinary to the cosmic as Giovanni muses over what it really means to be heroic, how science misses the point, and how age slyly puts all your mind-and soul-learning to the test.
In this accessible, teasing, and poignant collection, Giovanni offers straightforward, plain-speaking, sneakily resonant poems, many in prose form. She remembers her grandparents and the joys of simple pleasures: food, Sunday mornings, driving cross-country. She looks back to her childhood and first literary stirrings, and to her return, as a published poet and mother, to take care of her parents after her father’s stroke. When she describes the labor involved in scraping off layers of old floor wax, she cues us to reflect on how the past shapes and nurtures us even as we must free ourselves from its smothering accretions.
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 1968-1998
In this profound book of poetry, Giovanni continues to call attention to injustice and racism, celebrate Black culture and Black lives, and give readers an unfiltered look into her own experiences. In Make Me Rain, she celebrates her loved ones and unapologetically declares her pride in her black heritage, while exploring the enduring impact of the twin sins of racism and white nationalism. Giovanni reaffirms her place as a uniquely vibrant and relevant American voice with poems such as “I Come from Athletes” and “Rainy Days”—calling out segregation and Donald Trump; as well as “Unloved (for Aunt Cleota)” and “”When I Could No Longer”—her personal elegy for the relatives who saved her from an abusive home life.
Conversations with Nikki Giovanni *
A collection of 27 interviews with poet Giovanni that span the last 20 years, showing the evolution of Giovanni’s art and outlook. These exchanges originally appeared in commercial publications such as Ebony, Essence, and USA Today as well as in academic journals, and some record conversations between Giovanni and other writers, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko, James Baldwin, and Margaret Walker. An adept and focused speaker, Giovanni has consistently addressed political issues relating to feminism, race, and pan-Africanism, as well as more personal and literary ideas and values.
Gemini : An Extended Autobiographical Statement on my First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet
A young poet, attuned to the social problems of contemporary America, reveals her thoughts on the black experience.
A Good Cry : What We Learn from Tears and Laughter
A collection of poems with some short prose pieces, this collection gives a personal glimpse into the joys and sorrows of the poet’s long life, including remembrances of her close friend Maya Angelou and others whose lives helped shape her own.
Giovanni is one of America’s most popular poets, because she speaks her mind clearly and has such a good time doing it. As she writes in “A Poem: For Langston Hughes”: “wool is sheared . . . silk is spun / weaving is hard . . . but words are fun,” a sentiment she brings to rich fruition in her more playful poems, rhyming wonders reminiscent of old blues lyrics where every line is a double entendre, the sort of hand-on-your-hip songs Bessie Smith and Dinah Washington sashayed and smiled their way through. But Giovanni turns more somber and reflective as she expresses the love of a daughter and mother, and a woman’s deep-down love for a man that far outlasts the giddy romp of romance.
On My Journey Now : Looking at African-American History Through the Spirituals *
Personal and passionate, Giovanni’s short narrative talks about the sacred songs first sung by slaves, tracing how the people in bondage created the great spirituals to tell their stories, and what the songs still mean to us today. She addresses the horror of people torn from home and from family, Africans in America bought and sold, those who escaped, and those who stayed, and the wonder of how they made songs about their work. She analyzes the words for messages of defiance, whether it is Nat Turner’s “Steal Away” or the angry demand of “Before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave”; and she tracks a tradition that runs from the spirituals all the way to rhythm and blues and then hip-hop and rap. Her focus is always on her own favorites and what they have meant to her.
Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea : Poems and Not Quite Poems *
In this collection of 50 new poems and “not quite poems,” Giovanni pays sweet tribute to her grandmother and remembers Gwendolyn Brooks: “Not only one of the premier poets of America but a woman for all seasons.” She also shares family stories, ponders a scary bout with cancer, offers an unusual view of Harry Potter, and scathingly castigates Bush and Gore. In the title poem, she’s at her swinging best, funny and wise as she riffs on the line “we’re going to Mars,” writing in one striking stanza, “because whatever is wrong with us will not / get right with us so we journey forth / carrying the same baggage,” and yet, Giovanni hopes, we may be lightening that burden bit by bit.
This potent group of essays varies in tone from breezy to vehement and covers a mind-tingling assortment of topics that all relate in one way or another to being a black American, or as Giovanni prefers, a “Black american,” a usage she explains in “Black Is the Noun.” In her more meditative pieces, Giovanni recalls her childhood and years at Fisk University and admits to being a die-hard Trekker and an unrepentant smoker. She sings the praises of Toni Morrison and Dr. Mae Carol Jemison, the first black woman astronaut, and muses over why freed slaves chose to stay in the land of their oppressors. Then she takes off her gloves and goes after Clarence Thomas and other black conservatives for their rejection of affirmative action. She also absolutely shreds Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, grieves over the fact more black men study in jail than in college, and in a scathing bit of satire, mocks the complacency of white women.
Sacred Cows– and Other Edibles
Giovanni shows her range as a prose stylist in essays that stretch from political analyses to sports humor. As the title suggests, what joins these disparate works is Giovanni’s deflating attacks on contemporary hypocrisies. This does not altogether make easy reading; Giovanni has such hard things to say about the sorry state of America’s black community-and about the role its leaders have played in its disintegration-that some will be pained by her words. Leavening these passages are a half-dozen of the funniest sports pieces ever written.
Children’s Works
Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People *
Thirty-two poems that reflect aspects of the African American experience.
Three girls have fun playing dress-up at their grandmother’s house, even painting their toenails, but then they have nowhere to go. Includes activity ideas for parents and children.
The Grasshopper’s Song : An Aesop’s Fable Revisited
Angry that his singing is unappreciated by the Ants who relied on his music to make their summer work easier, Jimmy Grasshopper decides to sue them for lacking respect and not acknowledging his usefulness in their lives.
There is nothing more important to a child than to feel loved, celebrated in this gathering of poems written by Nikki Giovanni.
Fifty years after her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus, Mrs. Rosa Parks is still one of the most important figures in the American civil rights movement. This tribute to Mrs. Parks is a celebration of her courageous action and the events that followed.
Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children
Thirty-five poems recount the feelings of Black children about their neighborhoods, American society, and themselves.
A collection of poems primarily about nature and the seasons but also concerned with chocolate and scary movies.
–Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian