Nikki Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr in Knoxville, Tennessee.
She was raised in Cincinnati, received her BA in history
from Fisk University.
And has subsequently received more than 20 honorary degrees
from colleges and universities nationwide.
She has published more than 30 works,
including Conversations with Margaret Walker and James
Baldwin.
Racism 101, a collection of thoughtful
and thought provoking essays on race relations in the US.
Spin a Soft Black Song and other books for children.
And the collected poetry of Nick Giovanni
1968 to 1998, which includes a comprehensive timeline
of Giovanni's life and extensive notes
on her many books of poems.
Giovanni received three NAACP Image Awards
for Quilting the Black Eyed Pea, Blues for All the Changes,
and Love Poems.
She is a recipient of the Langston Hughes
medal for outstanding poetry and the inaugural Rosa Parks
Woman of Courage Award.
Nikki Giovanni's career as a poet
indeed has been exemplary of courage
since the very beginning.
She privately published and distributed her first two
books of poems.
In 1968, Black Feeling , Black Talk sold 2,000 copies.
And a few months later with the money
she'd made from sales of her first book
she published Black Judgment.
Within six months, Black Judgment
had been featured in the New York Times
and sold 6,000 copies, a figure any New York publishing
house would love to see for any book of poems.
With these first publications, Giovanni
asserts the themes that continue to unfurl in her work.
Anger, pride, a productive frustration, a call to revolt,
the celebration of domesticity and love
within her communities.
Giovanni rages against the assassination and murder
of peers and leaders, King of course
and Malcolm X, John F, and Robert Kennedy, Hammarskjold,
Lumumba and Medgar Evers.
Such death continues to enrage throughout her work.
Emmett Till, the Kent State students, Lenin and rapper
Tupac Shakur, whom Giovanni stated
would have been a combination of Martin Luther King and Malcolm
X.
After his death in Tupac's honor,
she had the words "thug life" tattooed on her left forearm.
Larry Neal in his essay, The Black Arts Movement
asserts the belief that an artist's ethics and aesthetics
are one.
Her arm, her page, her life are one and honor
bound in words in ink.
Please welcome Nikki Giovanni.
[APPLAUSE]