Washington (AFP) – Award-winning US poet Nikki Giovanni, who was at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement, died aged 81 after a long battle with cancer, her friends and family said Tuesday. Widely regarded as one of the most prolific African-American poets, Giovanni received numerous awards and a Grammy nomination for her work on civil rights, gender, and race issues.
Giovanni, whose most famous poems included “Knoxville, Tennessee” and “Nikki-Rosa,” died following her third cancer diagnosis, fellow writer Renee Watson said in a statement shared with AFP. She “died peacefully on December 9, 2024, with her life-long partner, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, by her side,” said Watson. “We will forever be grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us, to all her literary children across the writerly world,” poet Kwame Alexander told US media.
The Black Arts Movement, which flourished between 1965 and 1974, saw a wave of Black culture and literature championed by writers including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde. Giovanni’s cousin Allison Ragan, in the statement shared by Watson, said: “We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin.”
In her writing, Giovanni reflected on her childhood growing up in Tennessee and Ohio, pushed for Black and civil rights, and described her long struggle with lung cancer. “As one of the cultural icons of the Black Arts and Civil Rights Movements, she became friends with Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali, and inspired generations of students, artists, activists, musicians, scholars, and human beings, young and old,” Watson said in her statement.
Giovanni went on to teach creative writing and literature at Virginia Tech and received numerous awards including the NAACP Image Award, the Rosa Parks Award, and the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters. In 2004, she received a Grammy Best Spoken Word Album nomination for “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.”
In a brief biography on her website, Giovanni wrote: “I wanted to be a writer who dreams or maybe a dreamer who writes but I knew one book does not a writer make.” Watson said Giovanni had “refused to let a third bout (of cancer) interrupt her art,” and would be publishing a new volume of poems next year, entitled “The Last Book.”
© 2024 AFP
