1. Nikki Giovanni won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award.
54 Facts About Nikki Giovanni
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Nikki Giovanni was nominated for a 2004 Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.
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Nikki Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement.
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Poems such as "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki Giovanni-Rosa" have been frequently re-published in anthologies and other collections.
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Nikki Giovanni received numerous awards and held 27 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities.
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Nikki Giovanni was given the key to more than two dozen cities.
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Nikki Giovanni was honored with the NAACP Image Award seven times.
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Nikki Giovanni had a South American bat species, Micronycteris giovanniae, named after her in 2007.
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Nikki Giovanni was proud of her Appalachian roots and worked to change the way the world views Appalachians and Affrilachians.
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Nikki Giovanni taught at Queens College, Rutgers, and Ohio State, and was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech until she retired on September 11 2022.
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In 1958, Nikki Giovanni returned to Knoxville to live with her grandparents and attend Austin High School.
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Nikki Giovanni immediately clashed with the then-Dean of Women and was expelled after not having obtained the required permission from the dean to leave campus and travel home for Thanksgiving break.
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Nikki Giovanni moved back to Knoxville, where she worked at a Walgreens drug store and helped care for her nephew, Christopher.
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In 1964, Nikki Giovanni spoke with the new Dean of Women at Fisk University, Blanche McConnell Cowan, who urged her to return to Fisk that fall.
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In 1968, Nikki Giovanni took a semester at University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work toward an MSW and then moved to New York City.
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Nikki Giovanni briefly attended Columbia University School of the Arts toward an MFA in poetry and privately published Black Feeling Black Talk.
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In 1969, Nikki Giovanni began teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University.
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Nikki Giovanni was an active member of the Black Arts Movement beginning in the late 1960s.
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Nikki Giovanni noted that the birth of her son helped her to realize that children have different interests and require different content than adults.
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In 1970, Nikki Giovanni founded the publishing company NikTom, publishing her own work as well as supporting the work of other Black women writers, among them Gwendolyn Brooks, Mari Evans, Carolyn Rodgers, and Margaret Walker.
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Nikki Giovanni appeared on other television programs, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1972, accruing such popularity that her 30th birthday celebration at the Lincoln Center filled a 3,000-seat hall.
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In 1987, Nikki Giovanni was recruited by her partner and eventual wife Virginia Fowler to teach creative writing and literature at Virginia Tech.
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Nikki Giovanni received the NAACP Image Award seven times, received 20 honorary doctorates and various other awards, including the Rosa Parks and the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters.
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Nikki Giovanni held the key to several different cities, including Dallas, Miami, New York City, and Los Angeles.
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Nikki Giovanni was a member of the Prince Hall Order of the Eastern Star, she received the Life Membership and Scroll from the National Council of Negro Women, and was an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
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Nikki Giovanni was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early 1990s and underwent numerous surgeries.
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In 2002, Nikki Giovanni spoke in front of NASA about the need for African Americans to pursue space travel, and later published Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems, which dealt with similar themes.
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Nikki Giovanni was honored for her life and career by The HistoryMakers, along with being the first person to receive the Rosa L Parks Women of Courage Award.
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Nikki Giovanni was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor from Dillard University in 2010.
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In 2015, Nikki Giovanni was named one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History" for her contributions to poetry, education, and society.
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In 2020, Nikki Giovanni gave an extended interview to Bryan Knight's Tell A Friend podcast where she gave an assessment of her life and legacy.
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Nikki Giovanni is the subject of the documentary film Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, directed by Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson, which premiered at and won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
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Nikki Giovanni expressed that she usually felt very comfortable delivering speeches, but worried that her emotion would get the best of her.
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Nikki Giovanni thought that ending with a thrice-repeated "We will prevail" would be anticlimactic, and she wanted to connect back with the beginning, for balance.
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Nikki Giovanni announced her retirement from Virginia Tech in September 2022, having taught there for 35 years.
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Nikki Giovanni was conferred the title of University Distinguished Professor Emerita by the university in December 2022.
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On December 9,2024, Nikki Giovanni died of complications from lung cancer in a hospital in Blacksburg, Virginia.
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Nikki Giovanni had been working on a memoir titled A Street Called Mulvaney, and her final poetry collection, The Last Book, was set for publication in 2025.
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Nikki Giovanni was commonly praised as one of the best African-American poets emerging from the 1960s Black power and Black Arts Movements.
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Nikki Giovanni wrote more than two dozen books, including volumes of poetry, illustrated children's books, and three collections of essays.
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Nikki Giovanni's poetry reached more readership through her active engagement with live audiences.
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Nikki Giovanni gave her first public reading at the New York City jazz club, Birdland.
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Nikki Giovanni began to travel around the world and speak and read to a wider audience.
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Nikki Giovanni aligned herself with the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr.
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Nikki Giovanni co-wrote a book with James Baldwin entitled A Dialogue, in which the two authors speak about the status of the Black man in the household.
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Nikki Giovanni toured nationwide and frequently spoke out against hate-motivated violence.
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Nikki Giovanni collected her essays in the 1988 volume Sacred Cows.
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Nikki Giovanni's collection Bicycles: Love Poems is a companion work to her 1997 Love Poems.
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Nikki Giovanni featured on the track "Ego Trip by Nikki Giovanni" on Blackalicious's 2000 album Nia.
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Nikki Giovanni was commissioned by NPR's All Things Considered to create an inaugural poem for president Barack Obama.
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Nikki Giovanni was part of the 2016 Writer's Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University.
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In October 2017, Nikki Giovanni published her collection A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter, which includes poems that pay homage to the greatest influences on her life who have died, including close friend Maya Angelou, who died in 2014.
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In 2017, Nikki Giovanni presented at a TEDx event, where she read the poem "My Sister and Me".
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Nikki Giovanni's Big-eared Bat, known as Micronycteris giovanniae, was named in her honor in 2007.