Poet
Nikki Giovanni
American poet · 1943–2024
Nikki Giovanni emerged from the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s as one of its most electric voices — her early collections Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement sold in numbers poetry rarely sees, and her readings, often staged with gospel choirs, filled churches and concert halls.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised near Cincinnati, she returned to her grandmother's Knoxville every summer — the source of some of the warmest poems in American literature about Black family life. She taught at Virginia Tech for more than three decades, and after the 2007 campus shootings her chant-poem "We Are Virginia Tech" closed the convocation and steadied a grieving community.
She died in December 2024. Her work remains in copyright, so we present it in brief excerpts with links out.
Nikki Giovanni's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Knoxville, Tennessee1968
I always like summerbest
A single unpunctuated sentence of summer pleasures — fresh corn, okra, barbecue, gospel music at the church homecoming, being warm all the time. Written at the height of the Black Arts Movement's most militant period, its radicalism is joy itself: Black childhood rendered as pure abundance. It has become one of the most anthologized American poems about summer.
Read the full poem →Nikki-Rosa1968
childhood remembrances are always a dragif you're Black
Giovanni's most famous poem pushes back against outsiders — biographers, sociologists, well-meaning white critics — who would read her childhood as deprivation statistics. The hard times were real, the poem concedes, but so was the wealth: 'Black love is Black wealth.' It is a definitive statement about who gets to narrate a life.
Read the full poem →Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)
I was born in the congo
A tall-tale of cosmic proportions in which the speaker builds the sphinx, gazelles her way across the Sahara, and births civilizations between stanzas. Written as a praise-song for Black girls, it replaces centuries of diminishment with gleeful, planet-striding myth. Generations have memorized it for exactly that medicine.
Read the full poem →A Poem of Friendship
A quiet poem distinguishing friendship from romance: the bond it praises rests not on passion but on chosen, steady presence — being together not for what can be made or taken, but for what is shared. Its tenderness has made it a favorite at weddings between best friends. It shows the intimate register Giovanni commanded alongside her public fire.
Read the full poem →Choices1978
From Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, this poem lays out a working philosophy for constrained lives: when you can't do what you want, do what you can; when you can't say it, say something near it. Its closing observation — that this is why the body learns to move, to cry, to sing — turns limitation into the origin of art. Readers facing illness and hard seasons pass it hand to hand.
Read the full poem →Legacies1972
A grandmother calls her granddaughter to learn to make rolls; the girl refuses, sensing that to learn would be to accept, someday, the old woman's death. The poem's narrator notes that neither says what she means — 'and neither of them ever / said what they meant' is among Giovanni's most quoted observations about love's indirectness. Whole family histories fit inside this small kitchen scene.
Read the full poem →