LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Nikki Giovanni

American poet Nikki Giovanni (1943- ) is also a political activist, essayist and teacher. In the United States she has been consistently successful and acclaimed since she began writing in the late 1960s, during the time of the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements. Giovanni's early works, especially Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgement (1968), were radical and revolutionary, and she became known as the voice of a generation, exploring and expressing African American identity. Her later works are less strident, but she maintains her outspokenness and her strong social consciousness, skilfully combining the political with the personal. She has also written poetry for children, along with various collections of essays. Since 1987 she has been a professor of English Literature at Virginia Tech University.

Genre: Antiracist literature; Biographies; Poetry

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The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni by Nikki Giovanni
The complete early work of the renowned African-American poet.
Chasing Utopia: a hybrid by Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni's poetry has spurred movements and inspired songs, turned hearts and informed generations. She's been hailed as a healer and as a national treasure. But Giovanni's heart resides in the everyday, where family and lovers gather, friends commune, and those no longer with us are remembered. And at every gathering there is food--food as sustenance, food as aphrodisiac, food as memory. A pot of beans is flavored with her mother's sighs--this sigh part cardamom, that one the essence of clove; a lover requests a banquet as an affirmation of ongoing passion; homage is paid to the most time-honored appetizer: soup.
Blues - For All the Changes by Nikki Giovanni
Intimate, edgy, and unapologetic, Blues For All the Changes bears the mark of Nikki Giovanni's unmistakable voice. At once political and intensely personal, this long-awaited volume embodies the fearless passion and wit that have made Nikki Giovanni one of our most accessible poets; her audience defies all boundaries of race, class, age, and style. From the poignant "Stealing Home," Giovanni's tribute to Jackie Robinson, to the defiant "Road Rage Blues," a jam on time and space, these poems challenge the fates and invoke the precarious state of our environment, Giovanni's battle with illness, manners, and other topics seminal to one of our most compassionate, outspoken observers.

About Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni: a Literary Biography by Virginia C. Fowler
A thorough examination of Giovanni's life and work, from her earliest volume of poetry, Black Feeling Black Talk, to the recent Bicycles. The book addresses Giovanni's preoccupation with historical themes and the past, and demonstrates the pervasiveness of music in Giovanni's poetry. Drawing on extensive interviews with Giovanni's friends and family, this book offers biographical information not previously available in other publications. It references material from Giovanni's prose works to illuminate and contextualize the analysis of her poetry, examining its highly allusive and topical nature. The book also shows the intersections of Giovanni's biography and the public history of the United States from the 1960s to the present, making it of interest to general readers as well as those studying American and African-American poetry or black feminism.
Gemini: an extended autobiographical statement on my first twenty-five years of being a Black poet by Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni explores one of the most tumultuous periods of our history. Her essays take us from her childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, through her work in the militant Black revolution of the sixties, to her emergence as an acclaimed poet. Interweaving warm recollections of her personal history -- the enduring strengths of her family, the birth of her child, the rewards of writing -- with incisive vignettes of cultural and political history, including her often surprising opinions of LeRoi Jones, Angela Davis, Lena Horne, Stokeley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and many others. Giovanni chronicles the changing moods of society as she reveals the inner and outer worlds of a Black woman in twentieth-century America.
Black Sister: poetry by black American women, 1746-1980 by Erlene Stetson (Editor)
Introductory essays are followed by selections from the works of 58 African-American women poets dating back to the eighteenth century.

African American Women Writers

More about Nikki Giovanni at ProQuest One Literature

By Nikki Giovanni

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About Nikki Giovanni