NEW YORK – Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and speaker who rose to decades-long literary celebrity from borrowing money to publishing her first book, sharing her outspoken and talkative views on everything from racism and love to space travel and mortality shares, has done this 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.”

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