NEW YORK -- Nikki Giovanni, the poet, author, educator and public speaker who went from borrowing money to release her first book to spending decades as a literary celebrity, has died. She was 81.
Giovanni, subject of the prize-winning 2023 documentary "Going to Mars," died Monday with her lifelong partner, Virginia Fowler, by her side, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson.
"We will forever feel blessed to have shared a legacy and love with our dear cousin," said Allison Ragan, Giovanni's cousin, in a statement on behalf of the family.
The author of more than 25 books, Giovanni looked back on her childhood in Tennessee and Ohio, championed the Black Power movement, addressed her battles with lung cancer and reflected on such personal passions as food, romance, family and rocketing into space.
Giovanni's admirers ranged from James Baldwin to Teena Marie, who name-checked her on "Square Biz," to Oprah Winfrey, who invited the poet to her "Living Legends" summit in 2005, when other guests of honor included Rosa Parks and Toni Morrison.
Her best known work came early in her career -- the 1968 poem "Nikki-Rosa." It was a declaration of her right to define herself, a warning to others against telling her story and a brief meditation on her poverty as a girl and the blessings, from holiday gatherings to bathing in "one of those big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in."
Giovanni relied on support from friends to publish her debut collection, "Black Poetry Black Talk," which came out in 1968, and in the same year she self-published "Black Judgement."
"I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?" she wrote in a biographical sketch for Contemporary Writers. "A poem has to say something. It has to make some sort of sense; be lyrical; to the point; and still able to be read by whatever reader is kind enough to pick up the book."
Her opposition to the political system moderated over time, although she never stopped advocating for change and self-empowerment, or remembering martyrs of the past. In 2020, she was featured in an ad for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, in which she urged young people to "vote because someone died for you to have the right to vote."
She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tenn., and was soon called "Nikki" by her older sister. She was 4 when her family moved to Ohio and eventually settled in the Black community of Lincoln Heights. She would travel often between Tennessee and Ohio, bound to her parents and to her maternal grandparents in her "spiritual home" in Knoxville.
As a girl, she read everything from history books to Ayn Rand and was accepted to Fisk University, the historically Black school in Nashville, after her junior year of high school.
College was a time for achievement and for trouble. Her grades were strong, she edited the Fisk literary magazine and helped start the campus branch of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. But she rebelled against school curfews and other rules and was kicked out for a time because her "attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman," she later wrote.
After the school changed the dean of women, Giovanni returned and graduated with honors in history in 1967.
Giovanni had a son, Thomas Giovanni, in 1969. She never married the father, because, she told Ebony magazine, "I didn't want to get married, and I could afford not to get married." Over the latter part of her life she lived with her partner, Fowler, a fellow faculty member at Virginia Tech.
Poetry collections such as "Black Feeling Black Talk" sold thousands of copies, led to invitations from "The Tonight Show" and other television programs and made her popular enough to fill a 3,000-seat concert hall at Lincoln Center for a celebration of her 30th birthday. She also edited a groundbreaking anthology of Black women poets, "Night Comes Softly," and helped found a publishing cooperative that promoted works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker among others.
Giovanni was a National Book Award finalist in 1973 for a prose work about her life, "Gemini." She also received a Grammy nomination for the spoken word album "The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection."