NIkki Giovanni, the world-renowned American poet and leading voice of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, died on December 9 at the age of 81 after her third cancer diagnosis. A beloved poet and public intellectual for over 50 years, Giovanni wrote at the intersection of love, loneliness, gender, race, creativity, and more.

Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and then attended Fisk University in Nashville and poetry at Columbia University in New York. She published her first two collections of poetry, “Black Feeling,” “Black Talk” and “Black Judgment” in 1968, and rose to prominence as a politically engaged, emotionally attuned leader of the Black Arts Movement alongside figures such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin and Thelonious Monk and Audre Lorde.

Her career was amazing, with more than 30 books including Those Who Ride the Night Winds and Bicycles: Love Poem. Her latest book of poetry, The Last Book, will be published next year. Here are just a few of her most famous quotes:

On the subject of love:

We love… those who do… because we live in a world that requires light and darkness… partnership and solitude… sameness and difference… the familiar and the unknown… We love because it is the only true adventure.
– Love: Is a Human Condition, 1975

I believe all we can do is accept and give love and try to remember who dreamed, who dreams of us. And try to stay true to that.
– Acolytes, 2007

On the African American experience:

Childhood memories are always a burden when you are Black
/ You always remember things like living in Woodlawn / without an indoor toilet / and when you become famous or something / they never talk about how lucky you were to have / your mother / all to yourself and / how good that felt Water felt like you came to your bath.
– Nikki Rosa, 1968

About civil rights, social change and progress:

We have to live in the real world. If we don’t like the world we live in, change it. And if we can’t change it, we change ourselves. We can do something.
– as told to Claudia Tate in “Black Women Writers at Work,” Continuum, 1983

In the course of black aesthetic criticism, you were told that if you were a black writer or a black critic, they would tell you The is what you should do. This type of regulation cuts the question by defining parameters. I refuse recipes of any kind. In this case, the recipe was an insular militant stance. What do we do with an attitude? Literature is only as useful as it reflects reality.
– as Claudia Tate tells it

If Black History Month is not feasible, then the wind will not carry the seeds and let them fall on fertile ground the seedlings / and tell them clearly: / You are as good as everyone else / You have a place here too
– BLK History Month, 2002

I tell young people, ‘You have to do your job.’ Don’t sit around complaining about what wasn’t done.’ In my generation in America, we could fight segregation because we could defeat segregation, and we did. We cannot defeat racism. And so someone else has to lead the fight against racism because it is not our fight. We have abolished racial segregation. We’ve sorted it out. We cleaned the window. You can pay attention now.
– to the Guardian, February 2024.

On the topic of self-love:

If you don’t understand yourself, you won’t understand anyone else.
– in conversation with James Baldwin, 1971

I really hope that no white person ever has a reason to write about me because they’ll never understand that black love is black wealth and they’ll probably talk about my tough childhood and never understand that, and I was pretty much there happy.
– Nikki Rosa, 1968

On the subject of age:

Many people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Accept the change, no matter what it is; Once you have done this, you can learn about and benefit from the new world you find yourself in. You still bring all your previous experiences with you, but you’re riding at a different level. It’s completely liberating. Well, everything I do, I do because I want to. And I believe the best is yet to come.
– as told by Naomi Barr, 2007

Many people refuse to do things because they don’t want to be naked, because they don’t want to go without a guarantee. But that’s exactly what has to happen. You stay naked until you die.
– as told to Claudia Tate in “Black Women Writers at Work,” Continuum, 1983

I used to think I was becoming gentler. You know, I’m becoming an old lady and I’m really cool. And then I realized: No, the anger is still quite strong.
– to the Guardian, February 2024

On patriarchy:

The enemy is not people. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way of governing the world or doing things is the enemy, patriarchy in medicine, patriarchy in schools or in literature.
– as Toni Morrison tells in The Last Interview: And Other Conversations, 2020

For writing:

We write because we believe that the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
– Sacred Cows… and Other Edibles, 1988

I think you always write what you love. Whether grandmother, gourmet cuisine or mountains and rivers. Sunsets kissing the tallest building or chipmunks straying into bed. I like the peace and quiet. And I like the sound of silence. I’m a mountain girl. I listen and make lists of what I hear.
– Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid, 2013

We need poetry… We deserve poetry / We owe it to ourselves to recreate ourselves / and find a different, if not better, way to live.
– Acolytes, 2007