Nikki Giovanni, the charismatic and iconoclastic poet, activist, youngsters’s e book creator and professor who wrote, irresistibly and sensuously, about race, politics, gender, intercourse and love, died on Monday in Blacksburg, Va. She was 81.
The loss of life, in a hospital, was brought on by issues of lung most cancers, mentioned Virginia C. Fowler, her spouse.
Ms. Giovanni was a prolific star of the Black Arts Movement, the wave of Black nationalism that erupted in the course of the civil rights period and included the novelist John Oliver Killens, the playwright and poet LeRoi Jones, later often known as the fiery radical Amiri Baraka, and the poets Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez, amongst others. Like many ladies within the motion, Ms. Giovanni was confounded by the machismo that dominated it.
Yet Ms. Giovanni was additionally a star unbiased of the motion, a celeb poet and public mental who appeared on tv and toured the nation. She was a riveting performer, diminutive at simply 105 kilos — as reporters by no means did not level out — her cadence inflected by the jazz and blues music she beloved, with the timing of a comic or a Baptist preacher who drew crowds wherever she appeared all through her life. She mentioned her finest audiences had been school college students and jail inmates.
A full obituary will comply with.
