Award-winning American poet Nikki Giovanni, who was at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement, has died at the age of 81 after a long battle with cancer, local media reported on Tuesday.
Widely regarded as one of the most prolific African American poets, Giovanni has received numerous awards and a Grammy nomination for her work on civil rights, gender and race issues.
Giovanni, whose best-known poems were “Knoxville, Tennessee” and “Nikki-Rosa,” died after her third cancer diagnosis, media reported.
She “died peacefully on December 9, 2024, with her lifelong partner, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, by her side,” her friend and fellow writer Renee Watson said in a statement to DailyExpertNews.
“We will be forever grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us, to all her literary children across the writing world,” poet Kwame Alexander told US media.
The Black Arts Movement, which flourished between 1965 and 1974, saw a surge of black culture and literature, championed by writers such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde.
In her writing, Giovanni reflected on her childhood growing up in Tennessee and Ohio, pushed for blacks and civil rights, and described her long battle with lung cancer.
“One of the cultural icons of the Black Arts and Civil Rights Movements, she befriended Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin, James Baldwin, Nina Simone and Muhammad Ali, and inspired generations of students, artists, activists, musicians, scientists and people, young and old,” Watson said in her statement.
Giovanni went on to teach creative writing and literature at Virginia Tech and received numerous awards, including the NAACP Image Award, the Rosa Parks Award, and the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters.
In 2004, she received a Grammy Best Spoken Word Album nomination for “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.”
In a short biography on her website, Giovanni wrote: “I wanted to be a writer who dreams or maybe a dreamer who writes, but I knew that one book does not make a writer.”
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