Mar 01 2006
A Conversation with Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni, award winning poet, Professor of English at Virginia Tech.
Nikki Giovanni is an award winning poet and writer. She was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943. She was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio and graduated with honors in history from her Fisk University. Since 1987, she has been on the faculty at Virginia Tech, where she is a University Distinguished Professor. She is the NAACP Image Award winner for Literature in 1998, 2000, and 2003. She won the Langston Hughes award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters in 1996 and was the first recipient for the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award in 2001. She has been awarded 21 honorary doctorates from various universities nationwide. Her book include “Black Feeling, Black Talk,†“Black Judgement,†“Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea,†“Blues For All the Changes.†Her CD, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, was nominated for a Grammy award. She has just completed a children’s book about Rosa Parks. I met Ms. Giovanni at the California Institute of Technology on February 9th when she spoke on campus.
After I spoke with her, she gave a lecture at Beckman Auditorium on the campus of Caltech in Pasadena to a packed audience. During her speech she shared some of her poetry.
For more information, visit www.nikki-giovanni.com.
One Response to “A Conversation with Nikki Giovanni”
Thank you so much for this show. I am preparing a presentation for school psychologist regarding rethinking the “achievement gap” but Dr. Giovanni gave me the path with her poem we are going to Mars. Many educators I know Black, Latino, and White often lose hope. The optimism and love in her poems empowered me.