She Was Called the 'Princess of Black Poetry'

Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator, and public speaker who rose from borrowing money to release her first book to decades as a literary celebrity sharing her blunt and conversational takes on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality, has died. She was 81, the AP reports. Giovanni, subject of the prize-winning 2023 documentary Going to Mars, died Monday with her life-long partner, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, by her side, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson. "We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin," Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni's cousin, said in a statement on behalf of the family.

Author of more than 25 books, Giovanni was a born confessor and performer whom fans came to know well from her work, her readings and other live appearances, and her years on the faculty of Virginia Tech among other schools. Poetry collections such as Black Judgement and Black Feeling Black Talk sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from the Tonight Show and other television programs, and made her popular enough to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for a celebration of her 30th birthday. In poetry, prose and the spoken word, she told her story. She looked back on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, addressed her battles with lung cancer, and paid tribute to heroes from Nina Simone to Angela Davis.

She also reflected on such personal passions as food, romance, family, and rocketing into space, a journey she believed Black women uniquely qualified for, if only because of how much they had already survived. She also edited a groundbreaking anthology of Black women poets, Night Comes Softly, and helped found a publishing cooperative that promoted works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker among others. For a time, she was called "The Princess of Black Poetry." Giovanni's admirers ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who name-checked her on the dance hit "Square Biz," to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her "Living Legends" summit in 2005, when other guests of honor included Rosa Parks and Toni Morrison.

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Giovanni was a National Book Award finalist in 1973 for a prose work about her life, Gemini. She also received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. In January 2009, at the request of NPR, she wrote a poem about the incoming president, Barack Obama. Her best known work came early in her career; the 1968 poem "Nikki-Rosa." It was a declaration of her right to define herself, a warning to others (including obituary writers) against telling her story and a brief meditation on her poverty as a girl and the blessings that transcended it. It includes the lines, "and I really hope no white person ever has cause / to write about me / because they never understand / 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." (More Nikki Giovanni stories.)