Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr.[1][2] (born June 7, 1943) is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets,[2] her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends".[2] Giovanni is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.[3]
Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution".[2] During the 1970s, she began writing children's literature, and co-founded a publishing company, NikTom Ltd, to provide an outlet for other African-American women writers. Over subsequent decades, her works discussed social issues, human relationships, and hip hop. Poems such as "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki-Rosa" have been frequently re-published in anthologies and other collections.[4]
Giovanni has received numerous awards and holds 27 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities. She has also been given the key to over two dozen cities. Giovanni has been honored with the NAACP Image Award seven times. One of her more unique honors was having a South America bat species, Micronycteris giovanniae, named after her in 2007.[5]
Giovanni is proud of her Appalachian roots and works to change the way the world views Appalachians and Affrilachians.[6]
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. was born in Knoxville, Tennessee,[7] to Yolande Cornelia Sr. and Jones "Gus" Giovanni. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where her parents worked at Glenview School. In 1948, the family moved to Wyoming, Ohio, and sometime in those first three years, Giovanni's sister, Gary, began calling her "Nikki". In 1958, Giovanni returned to Knoxville to live with her grandparents and attend Austin High School.[4] In 1960, she began her studies at her grandfather's alma mater, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, as an "Early Entrant", which meant that she could enroll in college without having finished high school first.[8]
She immediately clashed with the then-Dean of Women and was expelled after neglecting to obtain the required permission from the Dean to leave campus and travel home for Thanksgiving break. Giovanni moved back to Knoxville, where she worked at a Walgreens drug store and helped care for her nephew, Christopher. In 1964, Giovanni spoke with the new Dean of Women at Fisk University, Blanche McConnell Cowan, who urged her to return to Fisk that fall. While at Fisk, Giovanni edited a student literary journal (titled Élan), reinstated the campus chapter of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), and published an essay in Negro Digest on gender questions in the Movement.[9] In 1967, she graduated with honors with a B.A. degree in history.
Soon after graduation, she suffered the loss of her grandmother, Louvenia Watson, and turned to writing to cope with the death. These poems would later be included in her collection Black Feelings, Black Talk. In 1968, Giovanni attended a semester at University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work toward an MSW and then moved to New York City. She briefly attended Columbia University School of the Arts toward an MFA in poetry and privately published Black Feeling, Black Talk.[10] In 1969, Giovanni began teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University. She was an active member of the Black Arts Movement beginning in the late 1960s. In 1969, she gave birth to Thomas Watson Giovanni, her only child.[9]
After the birth of her son, Giovanni was accused of setting a bad example because there were not many single moms at that time. Giovanni noted that the birth of her son helped her to realize that children have different interests and require different content than adults. This realization lead her to write six children's books.[11]
In 1970, she began making regular appearances on the television program Soul!, an entertainment/variety/talk show that promoted black art and culture and allowed political expression. Soul! hosted important guests such as Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Gladys Knight, Miriam Makeba, and Stevie Wonder. (In addition to being a "regular" on the show, Giovanni for several years helped design and produce episodes.) She published multiple poetry anthologies, children's books, and released spoken word albums from 1973 to 1987.[9]
Giovanni was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early 1990s and underwent numerous surgeries. Her book Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems, published in 1999, contains poems about nature and her battle with cancer. In 2002, Giovanni spoke in front of NASA about the need for African Americans to pursue space travel, and later published Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems, which dealt with similar themes.[10]
She has also been honored for her life and career by the HistoryMakers, along with being the first person to receive the Rosa L. Parks Women of Courage Award. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor from Dillard University in 2010.[9] In 2015, Giovanni was named one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History" for her contributions to poetry, education, and society.[15]
Giovanni gave an extended interview to Bryan Knight's Tell A Friend Podcast where she gave an assessment of her life and legacy.[16]
Seung-Hui Cho, a mass murderer who killed 32 people in the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007, was a student in one of Giovanni's poetry classes. Describing him as "mean" and "menacing", she approached the department chair to have Cho taken out of her class, and said she was willing to resign rather than continue teaching him. Cho was removed from her class in 2005.[21] After the massacre, Giovanni stated that, upon hearing of the shooting, she immediately suspected that Cho might be the shooter.[21]
Giovanni was asked by Virginia Tech president Charles Steger to give a convocation speech at the April 17 memorial service for the shooting victims (she was asked by Steger at 5:00 pm on the day of the shootings, giving her less than 24 hours to prepare the speech). She expressed that she usually feels very comfortable delivering speeches, but worried that her emotion would get the best of her.[22] On April 17, 2007, at the Virginia Tech Convocation commemorating the April 16 massacre,[22] Giovanni closed the ceremony with a chant poem, intoning:
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.[23][24][25]
Her speech also sought to express the idea that really terrible things happen to good people: "I would call it, in terms of writing, in terms of poetry, it's a laundry list. Because all you're doing is: This is who we are, and this is what we think, and this is what we feel, and this is why - you know?... I just wanted to admit, you know, that we didn't deserve this, and nobody does. And so I wanted to link our tragedy, in every sense, you know - we're no different from anything else that has ...."[22]
She thought that ending with a thrice-repeated "We will prevail" would be anticlimactic, and she wanted to connect back with the beginning, for balance. So, shortly before going onstage, she added a closing: "We are Virginia Tech."[22] Her performance produced a sense of unity and received a 54-second standing ovation from the over-capacity audience in Cassell Coliseum, including then-President George W. Bush.[26]
Writing
Giovanni in 1997
The Civil Rights Movement and Black Power movements inspired her early poetry, which was collected in Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), which sold over ten thousand copies in its first year; in Black Judgement (1968), selling six thousand copies in three months; and in Re: Creation (1970). All three of these early works aided in establishing Giovanni as a new voice for African Americans.(30) In "After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, Cheryl Clarke cites Giovanni as a woman poet who became a significant part of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement.[27] Giovanni is commonly praised as one of the best African-American poets emerging from the 1960s Black Power and Black Arts Movements.[28] Her early poems that were collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s are seen as radical as and more militant than her later work. Her poetry is described as being "politically, spiritually, and socially aware".[28]Evie Shockley describes Giovanni as "epitomizing the defiant, unapologetically political, unabashedly Afrocentric, BAM ethos".[29] Her work is described as conveying "urgency in expressing the need for Black awareness, unity, [and] solidarity." Likewise, Giovanni's early work has been considered to be "polemic" and "incendiary".[30] Examples of poems in which she vehemently advocated for change include "The True Import of Present Dialogue Black vs. Negro" (1968), "Poem for Black Boys" (1968) and "A Litany for Peppe" (1970).
Not only did Giovanni write about racial equality, but she also advocated for gender equality, as well. In fact, Odon states that "Giovanni's realignment of female identity with sexuality is crucial to the burgeoning feminist movement within the black community."[31] In the poem, "Revolutionary Dreams" (1970), Giovanni discusses gender and objectification. She writes, "Woman doing what a woman/Does when she's natural/I would have a revolution" (lines 14–16). Another example of a poem that encourages sexual equality is "Woman Poem" (1968). In "Woman Poem", Giovanni shows that the Black Arts Movement and racial pride were not as liberating for women as they were for men (Virginia Fowler, Introduction to the Collected Works of Nikki Giovanni). In "Woman Poem", Giovanni describes how pretty women become sex objects "and no love/or love and no sex if you're fat/get back fat black woman be a mother/grandmother strong thing but not woman."[32]
Giovanni herself takes great pride in being a "Black American, a daughter, mother, and a Professor of English".[28] Giovanni is also known for her use of African-American Vernacular English.[33] She has since written more than two dozen books, including volumes of poetry, illustrated children's books, and three collections of essays. Her work is said to speak to all ages, and she strives to make her work easily accessible and understood by both adults and children. Her writing, heavily inspired by African-American activists and artists,[33][34] also reflects the influences of issues of race, gender, sexuality, and the African-American family.[28] Her book Love Poems (1997) was written in memory of Tupac Shakur, and she has stated that she would "rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them."[35] Additionally, in 2007 she wrote a children's picture book titled Rosa, which centers on the life of Civil Rights leader Rosa Parks. In addition to this book reaching number three on the New York Best Seller list, it also received the Caldecott Honors Award, and its illustrator, Brian Collier, received the Coretta Scott King Award.[36]
Giovanni's poetry reaches more readership through her active engagement with live audiences. She gave her first public reading at the New York City jazz spot, Birdland.[37] Her public expression of "oppression, anger, and solidarity"[37] as well as her political activism allow her to reach more than just the poetic circles. After the birth of her son in 1969, Giovanni recorded several of her poems with a musical backdrop of jazz and gospel. She began to travel all around the world and speak and read to a wider audience. Even though Giovanni's earlier works were known to carry a militant, revolutionary tone, Giovanni communicated "a global sense of solidarity amongst oppressed peoples in the world" in her travels.[37] It is in this sense of human unity in which Giovanni aligns herself with the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr. Like King, Giovanni believes a unified, collective government must be made up of the everyday, ordinary citizen, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender.[37] In the 1970s and '80s her popularity as a speaker increased even more. In 1972 Giovanni interviewed Muhammad Ali on Soul![38]
Giovanni is often interviewed regarding themes pertaining to her poetry such as gender and race. In an interview entitled "I am Black, Female, Polite", Peter Bailey questions her regarding the role of gender and race in the poetry she writes.[39] Bailey specifically addresses the critically acclaimed poem "Nikki-Rosa," and questions whether it is reflective of the poet's own childhood and her experiences in her community. In the interview, Giovanni stresses that she did not like constantly reading the trope of the black family as a tragedy and that "Nikki-Rosa" demonstrates the experiences that she witnessed in her communities.[39] For example, Giovanni writes about her happy childhood as: "Black love is Black wealth and they'll/probably talk about my hard childhood/and never understand that/all the while I was quite happy" (lines 30–33).[40] Specifically, the poem deals with black folk culture and touches on such gender, race, and social issues as alcoholism and domestic violence and not having an indoor bathroom.[41]
Giovanni's poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s addressed black womanhood and black manhood among other themes. In a book she co-wrote with James Baldwin entitled A Dialogue, the two authors speak openly and frankly about the status of the black male in the household. Baldwin challenges Giovanni's opinion on the representation of black women as the "breadwinners" in the household. Baldwin states: "A man is not a woman. And whether he's wrong or right... Look, if we're living in the same house and you're my wife or my woman, I have to be responsible for that house."[36] Conversely, Giovanni recognizes the black man's strength, whether or not he is "responsible" for the home or economically advantaged. The interview makes it clear that regardless of who is "responsible" for the home, the black woman and the black man should be dependent on one another. In a 1972 Soul! interview with Mohammed Ali, Giovanni uses her popularity as a speaker to a broader audience to read some of her essay "Gemini" from her book Gemini. In the excerpt from that essay, Giovanni intones, "we are born men and women...we need some happiness in our lives, some hope, some love...I really like to think a black, beautiful loving world is possible."[38] Such themes appeared throughout her early poetry which focused on race and gender dynamics in the black community.[36]
Giovanni tours nationwide and frequently speaks out against hate-motivated violence.[41] At a 1999 Martin Luther King Day event, she recalled 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?"[42]
Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983) acknowledged black figures. Giovanni collected her essays in the 1988 volume Sacred Cows... and Other Edibles. Her more recent works include Acolytes, a collection of 80 new poems, and On My Journey Now. Acolytes is her first published volume since her 2003 Collected Poems. The work is a celebration of love and recollection directed at friends and loved ones, and it recalls memories of nature, theater, and the glories of children. However, Giovanni's fiery persona still remains a constant undercurrent in Acolytes, as some of the most serious verse links her own life struggles (being a black woman and a cancer survivor) to the wider frame of African-American history and the continual fight for equality.
Giovanni's collection Bicycles: Love Poems (2009) is a companion work to her 1997 Love Poems. Both works touch on the deaths of her mother, her sister, and those massacred on the Virginia Tech campus. "Tragedy and trauma are the wheels" of the bicycle. The first poem ("Blacksburg Under Siege: 21 August 2006") and the last poem ("We Are Virginia Tech") reflect this. Giovanni chose the title of the collection as a metaphor for love itself, "because love requires trust and balance."[43]
In Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (2013), Giovanni describes falling off of a bike and her mother saying, "Come here, Nikki and I will pick you up." She has explained that it was comforting to hear her mother say this, and that "it took me the longest to realize – no, she made me get up myself."[44] Chasing Utopia continues as a hybrid (poetry and prose) work about food as a metaphor and as a connection to the memory of her mother, sister, and grandmother. The theme of the work is love relationships.[45]
In 2004, Giovanni was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album at the 46th Annual Grammy Awards for her album The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. This was a collection of poems that she read against the backdrop of gospel music.(29) She also featured on the track "Ego Trip by Nikki Giovanni" on Blackalicious's 2000 album Nia. In November 2008, a song cycle of her poems, Sounds That Shatter the Staleness in Lives by Adam Hill, was premiered as part of the Soundscapes Chamber Music Series in Taos, New Mexico.
She was commissioned by National Public Radio's All Things Considered to create an inaugural poem for President Barack Obama. The poem, entitled "Roll Call: A Song of Celebration", ends with the following enthusiastic, optimistic three lines: "Yes We Can/Yes We Can/Yes We Can".[46] Giovanni read poetry at the Lincoln Memorial as a part of the bi-centennial celebration of Lincoln's birth on February 12, 2009.[47]
Giovanni was part of the 2016 Writer's Symposium by the Sea at Loma Nazarene University.[48] The University of California Television (UCTV) published the readings of Giovanni at the symposium. In October 2017 Giovanni published her newest collection, A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter. This collection includes poems that pay homage to the greatest influences on her life who have passed away, including close friend Maya Angelou who died in 2014.[49] Giovanni often reads from her books. In one reading she shares her poem "I Married My Mother". In 2017, Giovanni presented at a TEDx event. Here she read the poem "My Sister and Me". She called herself and her sister "two little chocolate girls". After reading the poems she states, "Sometimes you write a poem because damnit, you want to."[50]
Giovanni's Big-Eared Bat, also known as Micronycteris giovanniae, was named in her honor in 2007. The bat is found in western Ecuador and the naming was given "in recognition of her poetry and writings".[57]
(With Margaret Walker) A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974)[67]
(Author of introduction) Adele Sebastian: Intro to Fine (poems), Woman in the Moon (1985)[68]
Sacred Cows ... and Other Edibles (essays) (1988)[69]
(Editor, with C. Dennison) Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler (1991)[70]
(Author of foreword) The Abandoned Baobob: The Autobiography of a Woman (1991)
Racism 101* (essays, 1994)
(Editor) Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories about the Keepers of Our Traditions (1994)[71]
(Editor) Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance through Poems (1995)[28]
(Editor) 100 Best African American Poems (2010)[72]
(Afterword) Continuum: New and Selected Poems by Mari Evans (2012)
(Foreword) Heav'nly Tidings From the Afric Muse: The Grace and Genius of Phillis Wheatley by Richard Kigel (2017)(Foreword)
(Featured Artist) Artemis 2017 (Academic Journal of southwest Virginia) (2017)[73]
(Foreword) Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing (2018)
Related Research Articles
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Mari Evans was an African-American poet, writer, and dramatist associated with the Black Arts Movement. Evans received grants and awards including a lifetime achievement award from the Indianapolis Public Library Foundation. Her poetry is known for its lyrical simplicity and the directness of its themes. She also wrote nonfiction and edited Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, an important and timely critical anthology devoted to the work of 15 writers. Evans died at the age of 97 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Lucille Clifton was an American poet, writer, and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Clifton was a finalist twice for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award–winning play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975). She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home.
Harryette Mullen, Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles, is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin. Sanchez is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Grace Nichols FRSL is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977, before which she worked as a teacher and journalist in Guyana. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In December 2021, she was announced as winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry, better known as simply Def Poetry Jam or Def Poetry, is a spoken word poetry television series hosted by Mos Def and airing on HBO between 2002 and 2007. The series features performances by established and up-and-coming spoken word poets. Performances also include special appearances by well-known actors and musicians, as well as occasional performances by Mos Def himself. Co-created by Bruce George, Danny Simmons, Deborah Pointer, Stan Lathan, and Russell Simmons, the show is a spin-off of the popular Def Comedy Jam which began airing on HBO in the 1990s. As with Def Comedy, Simmons appears at the end of every episode to thank the audience.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Lucinda Roy is an American-based British novelist, educator and poet.
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
Eloise Greenfield was an American children's book and biography author and poet famous for her descriptive, rhythmic style and positive portrayal of the African-American experience.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Carolyn Marie Rodgers was a Chicago-based writer, particularly noted for her poetry. The youngest of four, Rodgers had two sisters and a brother, born to Clarence and Bazella Rodgers. Rodgers was also a founder of one of America's oldest and largest black presses, Third World Press. She got her start in the literary circuit as a young woman studying under Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks in the South Side of Chicago.
Nikky Finney is an American poet. She was the Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky for twenty years. In 2013, she accepted a position at the University of South Carolina as the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature. An alumna of Talladega College, and author of four books of poetry and a short-story cycle, Finney is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation. Her honors include the 2011 National Book Award for her collection Head Off & Split. Finney is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Becky Birtha is an American poet and children's author who lives in the greater Philadelphia area. She is best known for her poetry and short stories depicting African-American and lesbian relationships, often focusing on topics such as interracial relationships, emotional recovery from a breakup, single parenthood and adoption. Her poetry was featured in the acclaimed 1983 anthology of African-American feminist writing Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith and published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has won a Lambda Literary award for her poetry. She has been awarded grants from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to further her literary works. In recent years she has written three children's historical fiction picture books about the African-American experience.
The Furious Flower Poetry Center (FFPC) is the first academic center in the United States devoted to African-American poetry, housed by James Madison University. Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin is the current executive director. English professor Lauren Alleyne serves as an assistant director.
Rosemary Daniell is an American second-wave feminist poet and author. She is known for her poetry collection, "A Sexual Tour of the Deep South," that focused on anger and sexuality, as well as her memoirs "Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex, and Suicide in the Deep South" and "Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man."
1 2 3 4 Jane M. Barstow, Yolanda Williams Page (eds), "Nikki Giovanni", Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), p. 213.
1 2 Binnicker, Margaret D. (October 8, 2017), "Yolande Cornelia 'Nikki' Giovanni", Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture; updated March 7, 2018. Retrieved March 3, 2024.
1 2 3 Baldwin, James and Nikki Giovanni. "Excerpt from a Dialogue". Nikki Giovanni and Virginia C. Fowler, Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1992. 70–79.
1 2 Bailey, Peter. "I am Black, Female, Polite". Nikki Giovanni and Virginia C. Fowler, Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1992. 31–38.
↑ Giovanni, Nikki. "Nikki-Rosa". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved June 25, 2020.
↑ "Nikki Giovanni". Black Writers of PA: In Pursuit of Social Justice, Recognizing Pennsylvania Black Artists. Archived from the original on May 4, 2019. Retrieved October 25, 2017.
↑ Giovanni, Nikki (1976). Gemini: an extended autobiographical statement on my first twenty-five years of being a Black poet. Penguin Books. ISBN0140042644.
↑ A poetic equation: conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (Rev. paperbacked.). Howard University Press. 1974. ISBN0882580884.
↑ The chant of the women of Magdalena and the Magdalena poems, with author's preface, Tradition and poetic memory. Woman in the Moon Publications. 1990. ISBN0934172145.
↑ Sacred cows-- and other edibles (1sted.). W. Morrow. 1988. ISBN0688089097.
↑ Giovanni, Nikki (September 15, 1996). Grand mothers: poems, reminiscences, and short stories about the keepers of our traditions (1sted.). Holt. ISBN0805049037.
↑ Giovanni, Nikki (2010). The 100 best African American poems: (*but I cheated). Sourcebooks. ISBN9781402221118.
Edmonia Lewis: Wildfire in Marble by Rinna Evelyn Wolfe (1999)
Princess Ka'iulani: Hope of a Nation, Heart of a People by Sharon Linnea (2000)
Tatan'ka Iyota'ke: Sitting Bull and His World by Albert Marrin (2001)
Multiethnic Teens and Cultural Identity by Barbara C. Cruz (2002)
The "Mississippi Burning" Civil Rights Murder Conspiracy Trial: a Headline Court Case by Harvey Fireside (2003)
Early Black Reformers by James Tackach (2004)
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 edited by Robert H. Mayer (2005)
No Easy Answers: Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement by Calvin Craig Miller (2006)
Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese-American Incarceration During World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference by Joanne Oppenheim (2007)
Don't Throw Away Your Stick Till You Cross the River: The Journey of an Ordinary Man by Vincent Collin Beach with Anni Beach (2008)
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
