Award-winning Grammy nominated US poet Nikki Giovanni has died Tuesday, aged 81 following a prolonged battle with cancer,
Giovanni was lauded as the most fluent African-American poets received several awards for her work on civics, gender, race issues and Black Arts Movement,
The author of poems like ‘Knoxville, Tennessee’ and ‘Nikki-Rosa’, died following her third cancer diagnosis.
She “died peacefully on December 9, 2024, with her life-long partner, Virginia (Ginney) Fowler, by her side,” her friend and fellow writer Renee Watson said in a statement to CNN.
“We will forever be grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us, to all her literary children across the writerly world,” poet Kwame Alexander told journalists.
Between 1965 and 1974, the Black Arts Movement thrived with waves of Black culture and literature championed by writers including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde.
Most times, Giovanni mused about childhood, growing up in Tennessee and Ohio pushed for Black and civil rights, and described her long struggle with lung cancer.
“As one of the cultural icons of the Black Arts and Civil Rights Movements, she became friends with Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali, and inspired generations of students, artists, activists, musicians, scholars and human beings, young and old,” Watson said in her statement.
Giovanni taught 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.
She received a Grammy Best Spoken Word Album nomination for ‘The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection’ in 2024.
On her website, Giovanni penned: “I wanted to be a writer who dreams or maybe a dreamer who writes but I knew one book does not a writer make.”
