Nikki Giovanni ranks among the most widely admired and distinguished African-American poets of the twentieth century. She reached maturity amid the charged and confrontational climate of the Civil Rights Movement, allowing the energy and freshness of that moment to permeate her most resonant work. Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943, she saw her family relocate to Cincinnati soon afterward, yet returned to Knoxville in 1957 to live with her grandparents. Enrolling early at Nashville’s all-Black Fisk University in 1960, she was dismissed before finishing her first year, spent several years working in Cincinnati, and rejoined Fisk in 1964 to complete her B.A. While on campus she assisted in the writers’ workshop and joined the university chapter of SNCC, the non-violent Civil Rights organization. After graduation she moved to New York in 1968 to study at Columbia’s School of Fine Arts, issuing three poetry collections between 1968 and 1970 that drew substantial notice and praise.
Giovanni founded her own NikTom publishing company in 1970. The next year she recorded several of her most celebrated poems for the Right On label on Truth Is on Its Way, supported by gospel performances from the New York Community Choir. The album became a genuine success, reaching number 15 on the R&B album charts. A second collaboration with the New York Community Choir, Like a Ripple on a Pond, appeared on the NikTom imprint in 1973 and fell just short of the Top 50. For her third musical project she changed direction, engaging Arif Mardin to supply backing music for The Way I Feel, released in 1975. Throughout these years Giovanni continued to concentrate on poetry while lecturing nationwide. Motherhood prompted a wave of children’s verse, prompting Folkways to issue two recordings in that vein, The Reason I Like Chocolate (1976) and Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978); the label also released another Giovanni project, Legacies, in 1976. She sustained her writing and lecturing through the 1980s and 1990s and has served as professor of English at Virginia Tech since the late 1980s. Collectables issued a new recording drawn from a 1997 live reading, In Philadelphia, and also reissued her first three albums on CD.
