The New Yorker:

Remembering an indelible American author and activist.

By Kevin Young

Nikki Giovanni died this week, at the age of eighty-one, as that rarest of things: a best-selling poet. Her work burst onto the scene in the nineteen-sixties already fully formed—it was concerned, as much of the Black Arts poetry of the day was, with injustice and liberation, but also exhibited her homegrown humor and a Southern sensibility. She drew inspiration from her birthplace, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and her early years in Cincinnati, challenging the clichéd “hard time” narratives often imposed on Black experiences, especially those of growing up. “Childhood remembrances are always a drag / if you’re Black,” she observed ironically, in her poem “Nikki-Rosa,” but she preferred to remind readers that “Black love is Black wealth.”

Her many books explored this rich terrain of Black thought, one marked by anger and beauty and wry social commentary. Her often lowercase, barely punctuated lines weren’t afraid to brag, as in her popular “ego trippin”—which tapped into the tradition of the Black boast that stretches from Bo Diddley to Kendrick Lamar—or to speak to revolutionary uncertainty, which she made funny and fierce as few others did. Both aspects appear in the anthology of African American poetry I edited, which places her among a cohort of profound writers, many of whom—like June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, and Jayne Cortez—are no longer with us. As someone I know said upon hearing the news of Giovanni’s death,“Trees are falling.”

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