Nikki Giovanni, the award-winning US poet who became one of the leading voices of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, has died aged 81.

Giovanni died Monday after her third cancer diagnosis, her friend, author Renée Watson, said in a statement to NPR.

“We will forever be grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us and to all her literary children throughout the writing world,” said poet Kwame Alexander.

Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee, but was called Nikki by her older sister. She studied at Fisk University in Nashville. There she met several black writers, including Amiri Baraka and Dudley Randal, before studying poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts.

In 1968, she published her first two poetry collections—Black Feeling, Black Talk, and Black Judgment—launching a career that spanned more than 30 books, including Those Who Ride the Night Winds and Bicycles: Love Poems.

She became part of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement, which included figures such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Thelonious Monk and Audre Lorde. As a civil rights activist and politically active writer, Giovanni also attracted the attention of the FBI; She told the Pittsburgh Press that she always invited the agents who were monitoring her to her home “for coffee because I knew they wanted to check out the place.”

Giovanni wrote accessible poems about black liberation as well as poems about love, gender, and the small joys of family life, and became a public figure. She appeared on the black arts show Soul! on. in conversation with the likes of Baldwin and Muhammad Ali, edited many books of poetry and essays, championed hip-hop, and wrote several children’s books, including Rosa, an award-winning biography of Rosa Parks.

Giovanni taught English at Virginia Tech from 1987 to 2022. In 2007, one of her former poetry students murdered 32 people in the Virginia Tech shooting. Giovanni later said she asked the university to remove him from her class in 2005 because she felt he was threatening.

Asked about the shooting, Giovanni said: “Killing is a lack of creation.” It is a lack of imagination. It is a lack of understanding of who you are and your place in the world. Life is an interesting and… good idea.”

When she died, she was working on a final collection of poetry and a memoir, A Street Called Mulvaney.

“I used to think I was becoming mellower,” Giovanni told the Guardian in February. “You know, I’m becoming an old lady and I’m really cool. And then I realized: No, the anger is still quite strong.”

Giovannie was diagnosed with lung cancer in the 1990s and underwent several surgeries. She is survived by her son Thomas, her granddaughter, and her wife Virginia Fowler, an English professor who became Giovanni’s biographer before her marriage.