“You seem like a poet.”
When Nikki Giovanni said these words after a two-hour interview in January 2007, she shifted the focus of my life from covering the news to making art using the news. Her matter-of-fact declarations gave me what she has given millions of readers, students, and fellow artists for nearly 60 years: faith.
That day, under Nikki’s careful direction, I typed and collated the poetry passages I had scrawled in composition books and notepads over the years, leaving the rest to her. Less than three months later, I faced my fears about my artistic shortcomings, chose faith in what I could accomplish outside of the Atlanta newsroom, and enrolled in Virginia Tech’s nascent MFA program. There, Nikki always claimed to be Nikki. A renowned creative writing professor for over 30 years.
I was accepted on April 16th. It was a day when Tech and the world were shocked by the horrific violence committed by a student whom Nikki had banned from class. While reporting the news that the student had killed 32 Hokies and wounded 17, I trusted her Southern listening and language skills and decided to use my journalism training to pursue a career in poetry. And infinite compassion is my compass. In any case, she knew that I, too, had been given the tools I needed by watching Baptist men and women, like her, step out in faith and share their testimonies.
When I call, she says, “The answer is always yes.” “If it doesn’t work out, you can always change your mind later.”
The contagious and uncompromising belief that humanity can choose good and embody the power of the sacred word, combined with unapologetic self-possession and generosity, make our Nicki one of America’s most accessible voices and certainly the most prophetic. One of the voices announces. This millennium. For Nikki, who passed away Monday at age 81, our future depends on our willingness to learn from everyday Black people who refuse to accept the brutality of the status quo as an indisputable reality. Her poetry is grounded in faith as the fuel that takes us to places she has explored since she was a girl in Knoxville and Cincinnati.
Nikki has remained my North Star ever since I left the crazy-dash newspaper assembly line. When a car accident ruined my graduate school budget, most of my friends shrugged their shoulders, but without me even asking, she found herself getting a call within hours from her administrator about a grant to cover the cost of repairs. When I told Nikki I needed some academic leave when my mother had cancer, she suggested independent research into the Black Arts Movement and she helped define and schedule meetings about my mother’s care. (She also made sacrifices for her family and did not want me to endure the delays she experienced.)
After I graduated from the College of Engineering, earned my doctorate in literature, gender, and sexuality studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and became a professor at Wake Forest University, hate instigators sent threatening emails to: Department of Color. I wanted to leave the college where her sister friend Maya Angelou had taught for decades, but Nikki texted me through Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, my partner of nearly 40 years, to tell me I should think again. People who love you. Maya was your aunt and I am your godmother… Let’s be strong for this ❤️ .”
You may be wondering why so many people from all walks of life are experiencing so much grief this week. Stories like mine are noteworthy and omnipresent. We’ve watched Nikki appoint, anoint and empower many people, always saying ‘yes’ and wanting to know who to read, watch and listen to next. Just as we, her peers and literary children, gave her the early works of Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Remica Bingham-Risher, and others known primarily to academics at the time, she too brought them into her orbit and made herself known to everyday people. I was introduced to . Three generations were engaged to see who would storm the castle next and hold a mirror up to the naked emperor. See what results our grandmothers’ prayers brought. She gave flowers to writers and friends Angelou, Toni Morrison, and E. Lynn Harris, and actors Ruby Dee and Novella Nelson while they were alive, and to comfort those left behind when her beloved poet Lucille Clifton left, she curated an anthology and large-scale Organized group readings. It’s too early.
Nikki Giovanni (second from left) attending the 2015 Maya Angelou stamp unveiling. With her, from left, Howard University professor Eleanor Traylor, First Lady Michelle Obama, Postmaster General Megan Brennan, Oprah Winfrey, and artist Ross Rossin.
(Jacqueline Martin / Associated Press)
Wherever Nikki lands, there’s room to laugh, have dozens play (preferably via bid whist), celebrate, mourn, and sing along with these and other giants. And she brought with her many of us who would trust her to lead her humbly blazing path. Ginney is by her side, and their love is a model for beleaguered LGBTQIA youth, unashamed but fiercely protected until the world finds out. “Going to Mars: Nikki Giovanni Project,” This year’s Emmy-winning production leaves few pertinent questions unanswered. So, if you’re eyeing a Nikki rocketship, start there and fine-tune your voice.
Nikki loved good song, especially jazz, and enjoyed champagne and meals flavored with lavender from her garden. But let’s not forget: When Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was a kid, she was into hip-hop, and others denounced that music as earworm “gangsta rap” that, like her, would kill and destroy the next generation rather than excite him. folk hero. “I am a thug.” She told anyone who would listen, showing off the “Thug Life” tattoo she got on her left arm after Lamar’s predecessor, Tupac Shakur, was murdered in 1997. This was when hip-hop started to take the top spot in pop. Charts and commands the zeitgeist. One of my memorable moments from 2013 was playing to hear her alto lilt and girlish laughter. Radio DJ Sway Calloway She is happily simultaneously a “little old lady” and everything that “I’m a Gangster” encompasses. For those of us who choose to become self-indulgent and go our own way, Nikki is always waiting at the welcome table when we are ready to receive the good sense she and other elders and ancestors impart.
Like poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks and another supernova, Prince, Nikki has always connected with like-minded iconoclasts and what she calls “space monsters.” Anger, glee, irreverence, and longing are our greatest and most evil weapons. From her early collections “Black Feeling, Black Talk” and “Black Judgment” from the late 1960s to her more recent collections “A Good Cry” (2017) and “Make Me Rain,” published in 2020, Plague and Prosperity; Her refusal to give in to despair has kept her where she is.
When we called for an interview in 2007, she was promoting “Acolytes,” written about the deaths of first her mother, then her sister and her aunt, all within a matter of months. In her own journey with illness, including the journey that ended her physical journey on this side of eternity, Nikki has found the exact clarity to declare her faith, the unconditional love she gives to those who have chosen her in the midst of their grief and pain. . If we don’t believe, we die. expectation our Sad she is leaving us A conversation about the liberating power of unconditional love Doreen St. in the New Yorker. Felix and host Bianca Vivion and her biographical documentary are examples of how to live an ever-evolving, freer life, the title of which is taken from a poem in “Acolytes.”black eyed pea quilting,” She predicted “We’re Going to Mars” long before billionaires even considered space colonization.
Now it’s our turn to join Nikki as she sings as her spirit soars into space, finally in infinite and complete freedom. Even as Octavia Butler’s dystopian vision unfolds in “The Parable of the Sower” and “The Parable of the Talents,” the homeless and most vulnerable people become targets of crime and the Earth’s hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis occur. us If we take a hard look in the mirror at what we have done, we should not run from fear of what we will face. The poem Nikki read in her 2017 TED Talk, “Fear: Eat in or Take Out,” teaches us how to “distill fear” instead of persuading some force to mix our fear and hate. To divide and conquer us all. As Nikki told us, we TED Talk, “Learn to distill your fear” Do not allow any force to persuade us to mix hatred and fear, which gives them the power to divide and conquer us all.
Ignoring the unconscionable insults that come my way, I cling to Nikki’s voice, and that voice is everywhere.
Search her online and listen to her calls. Spread your smile and love to those who love you. You and you and you too sound like poets.
L. Lamar Wilson, the 2024-2025 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University, is Professor of Creative Writing, Literature, and Film at Florida State University. He is the author of: “Holy Legion” (Blair, 2013) and “Change” (PBS/POV Shorts, 2019), “Going to Mars: Nikki Giovanni Project.”
