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NIKKI GIOVANNI |
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Giovanni, Yolande Cornelia ("Nikki") (b. June 7, 1943, Knoxville, Tenn.), groundbreaking African American poet who began writing during the Black Arts Movement and who continues to celebrate black culture in her work.Nikki Giovanni, one of the best-known contemporary black poets, rose to prominence in the 1960s as part of the generation of young black poets of the Black Arts and Black Power movements whose work reflected their radical political views. A typical poem of hers from that era, "My Poem," begins: i am 25 years old black female poet wrote a poem asking nigger can you kill if they kill me it won't stop the revolution While Giovanni's Black Arts poetry is still often anthologized, her range has expanded throughout the decades to reflect other facets of the African American experience. Giovanni, originally named Yolande Cornelia after her mother, was raised in Wyoming, Ohio, but spent summers and her junior and senior years of high school with her grandmother in Knoxville, Tennessee. Intelligent, bold, and outspoken since childhood, she entered Fisk University at age seventeen, but was asked to withdraw later that fall for "attitudes [which] did not fit those of a Fisk woman." Giovanni returned four years later, and eventually graduated with an honors degree in history in 1967. As an undergraduate, she helped reinstate Fisk's chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was part of a writing workshop led by black author John O. Killens. The year she graduated, Giovanni published her first poetry collection, Black Feeling. She followed it with Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgment (1970). These books secured her reputation as one of the most accessible of the young writers whose poems encouraged black solidarity and revolution, and Giovanni soon became the most prominent woman writer of the Black Arts movement. Giovanni was also well-known for dynamic readings of her poetry, and she recorded several albums of her readings set to Gospel and other black music, including Truth is on Its Way, which became a bestseller in 1971. That same year she published a collection of autobiographical essays, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years at Being a Black Poet. At about the same time, her poetry became less aggressively political and more reflectively personal. As Giovanni explained the transition, "I like to think I've grown and changed ... How else can I ask people to read my work or listen to me?" In 1969, she gave birth to a son, and she has since written several books of poetry meant for black children. Giovanni's poetry for adults in collections such as My House (1972), The Women and the Men (1972), and Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978) explored relationships between black men and black woman, connections between families, and simple questions of identity and purpose for the African American women who found themselves, as she said: black female and bright in a white male mediocre world. In the 1980s and 1990s Giovanni published two more books of essays, which address both personal and larger social issues. The recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards, in 1989 Giovanni became professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and continues to write and to lecture around the country. In 1996 she published The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, a comprehensive volume that reflects her artistic and personal evolution during her first three decades as a writer. Above all, in her poetry, essays, and speeches she still celebrates black identity, which she sees as the defining characteristic of African American poets, who "see love and beauty in the blooming of the Black community; power in a people whose only power has been the truth." Contributed By: Lisa Clayton Robinson |
| Reference: Encarta Africana, http://athena.english.vt.edu/Giovanni/Nikki_Giovanni.html |
| Constructed By: Kimberly Williams |
