Saying Goodbye to Nikki Giovanni

My first introduction to Nikki Giovanni came in the fall of my sixth-grade year in my school’s library.  Not unfamiliar with public libraries, I was a library kid through and through and read vivaciously since learning how to read and being able to do so on my own. My middle years are the years that really started to define the reader, writer, and Black woman that I would grow up to be. I fondly remember discovering a plethora of Black women writers including the plays of Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake Shange, the novels of Toni Morrison and so much poetry. Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, yet it was Nikki Giovanni’s poetry that spoke to me the most at the time in my young life. I remember most that her poetry felt alive, mystic, humorous, weighty and so timely for a Black girl stumbling upon her words while walking through the well-stocked and well-loved library of her public school in the late 90’s and figuring out her Blackness and her ever changing body thanks to poetry. The place Giovanni’s poetry and her Black women contemporaries touched is sacred and a cornerstone of my understanding of literature and the written word. Nikki Giovanni — poet, writer, critic, editor, orator, teacher, mother, ancestor, and more — died on December 9, 2024. I’ll spare you the usual “the news left me speechless” reactions that we hear and read so often when someone we admire passes on. I was scrolling Bluesky on my desktop and came across a post announcing her death, and I stopped and …