NEW YORK – Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and speaker who rose from borrowing money to publishing her first book to become a decades-long literary celebrity sharing her outspoken and talkative views on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality died. She was 81.

Giovanni, subject of the award-winning 2023 documentary “Going to Mars,” died Monday with her lifelong partner Virginia (Ginney) Fowler by her side, according to a statement from her friend and author Renée Watson

“We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and a love with our dear cousin,” Allison (Pat) Ragan, Giovanni’s cousin, said in a statement on behalf of the family.

Giovanni, author of more than 25 books, was a natural confessor and performer whom fans came to know well through her work, readings and other live performances, as well as her years on the faculty at Virginia Tech and other schools. Poetry collections like “Black Judgment” and “Black Feeling Black Talk” sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from “The Tonight Show” and other television shows, and made her so popular that she filled a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for a celebration her 30th birthday.

She told her story in poetry, prose and spoken word. She looked back on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, talked about her battle with lung cancer, paid tribute to heroes from Nina Simone to Angela Davis, and reflected on personal passions such as food, romance, family and the Flight into space, a journey that she felt black women were particularly qualified for simply because of how much they had already survived. She also edited a groundbreaking anthology of black women poets, Night Comes Softly, and helped found a publishing cooperative that marketed works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker, among others.

For a time she was called “The Princess of Black Poetry.”

“All I know is that she is the cowardly, bravest, least understanding, most sensitive, slowest to anger, most unworldly, lying, most honest woman I know,” her friend Barbara Crosby wrote in the introduction to “The Prosaic Soul of.” . Nikki Giovanni,” a nonfiction prose anthology published in 2003. “To love them is to love contradictions and conflicts, is to never understand but to be sure that everything is life.”

Giovanni’s admirers ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, whom she mentioned by name in the dance hit “Square Biz,” to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her 2005 “Living Legends” summit, which also included Rosa Parks Guests of honor included and Toni Morrison. Giovanni was a 1973 National Book Award finalist for a prose work about her life, “Gemini.” She also received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.”

In January 2009, at the request of NPR, she wrote a poem about new President Barack Obama:

“I will walk the streets

And knock on doors

Share it with the people:

Not my dreams, but yours

I’ll talk to people

I will listen and learn

I make the butter

Then clean the butter churn.”

____

Giovanni had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1969. She never married her father because, as she told Ebony magazine, “she didn’t want to get married and could afford not to get married.” In the latter part of her life she lived with her partner Virginia Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech.

She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was soon nicknamed “Nikki” by her older sister. She was four years old when her family moved to Ohio, eventually settling in the black community of Lincoln Heights outside Cincinnati. She often traveled back and forth between Tennessee and Ohio, connected with her parents and her maternal grandparents in her “spiritual home” in Knoxville.

As a girl, she read everything from history books to Ayn ​​Rand and was accepted into Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville, after her freshman year of high school. College was a time of success and difficulty. Her grades were good, she edited the literary magazine Fisk and helped found the campus branch of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. But she rebelled against school curfews and other rules and was kicked out for a time because her “attitudes were not consistent with those of a Fisk woman,” she later wrote. After the school changed its women’s dean, Giovanni returned and graduated with honors in history in 1967.

Giovanni relied on the support of friends to publish her debut collection, Black Poetry Black Talk, which appeared in 1968, and she self-published Black Judgment the same year. The radical Black Arts Movement was at its peak, and early Giovanni poems such as “A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why,” “Of Liberation,” and “A Litany for Peppe” were militant calls to overthrow white power. (“The worst junkie or black businessman is more human than the best honkie”).

“I was considered a writer who writes out of anger, and that confuses me. What else do writers write from?” She wrote a biographical sketch for Contemporary Writers. “A poem has to say something. It has to make some sense, be lyrical, get to the point, and yet be readable by any reader who is kind enough to pick up the book.”

Her resistance to the political system diminished over time, although she never stopped advocating for change and self-empowerment or remembering the martyrs of the past. In 2020, she appeared in an ad for presidential candidate Joe Biden urging young people to “vote because someone died so you have the right to vote.”

Her best-known work came at the beginning of her career; the 1968 poem “Nikki-Rosa.” It was a declaration of her right to define herself, a warning to others (including obituary writers) not to tell her story, and a brief meditation on her poverty as a girl and the blessings which she had from holiday gatherings to bathing in “one of those big tubs These people in Chicago grill in,” which went beyond that.

“And I really hope no white person ever has a reason to do that

write about me

because they never understand

Black love is black wealth and so will they

probably talk about my difficult childhood

and never understand it

I was pretty happy the whole time.”