Latest news with #NikkiGiovanni
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Virginia Tech honors the life and works of Nikki Giovanni
BLACKSBURG, Va. (WFXR) — Virginia Tech celebrated the legacy of esteemed poet, mentor, and artist Nikki Giovanni inside its Center for the Arts on Sunday. Giovanni died on December 9, 2024, after losing her third battle with cancer. After her death, the famed writer was honored in the New York Times, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and now, at Virginia Tech. 'First of all, I'm happy to be here and I don't know how you could not be happy to be here, even though the occasion may be somewhat sad,' said comedian and friend of Giovanni W. Kamau Bell. 'To be invited to a room to celebrate Nikki Giovanni means you're doing the right thing in life.' Two dozen friends, students, colleagues, and mentees of Giovanni's performed throughout a two-and-a-half-hour ceremony, all the while joking that the woman they were honoring often deferred the spotlight. But just a day after she would have celebrated her 82nd birthday, the timing seemed right to honor the life of a legend. 'She was incomparable,' said friend and Virginia Tech alumna Traci DeShazor. 'She was Nikki Giovanni. She was Virginia Tech. And we should all be grateful to have lived during the same time as her.' Nikki Giovanni receives a posthumous honor, the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement Across those 24 tributes was a dazzling display of art, performed across song, dance, and poetry. But there were more traditional tributes as well. A number of Giovanni's students were in attendance, including 2014 Virginia Tech graduate Jordan Holmes, whose relationship with Giovanni dates back to 2012. 'She ended up feeling more like a grandmother figure than just a mentor,' said Holmes, who first met Giovanni through her creative writing courses. Giovanni's partner Virginia Fowler was presented with flowers and a unanimously approved joint resolution from the Virginia state legislature recognizing Giovanni's contributions to both Blacksburg and the commonwealth. And Virginia Tech president Tim Sands spoke to Giovanni's everlasting impact on Virginia Tech, where she taught in the English department as a professor of distinction for more than three decades. 'Legacies are often memorialized through inscriptions on buildings, plaques, and monuments,' said Sands. 'Nikki Giovanni's legacy lives on in the words she gave us, in the hope and vision that they continue to inspire.' That being said, the school is still memorializing Giovanni's words in permanent fashion. A new immersive exhibit that offers readings of two of her most well-known poems officially opened on Sunday, and the school says it has plans to add on to the exhibit in the coming months. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project review – electric film about radical thinker and poet
Nikki Giovanni, bestselling American poet and civil rights activist, blazed on to the scene in the 1960s. In this documentary, completed before she died in December, we watch Giovanni in her late 70s, reigning over sold-out public appearances. On stage she recites poems about love, race and gender and in between, with the timing of a standup comedian, she has the auditorium erupting in whoops and laughter. Posing for selfies, a woman tells Giovanni she named her daughter after her; another says she wrote to her on the verge of dropping out of college. 'You wrote back. I'm a teacher now!' In archive footage, Giovanni as a young woman, reads her 1968 poem Nikki-Rosa, which has a line about how white people fail to understand the lives of black people: 'they'll probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy'. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, during segregation and, after witnessing domestic violence at home, she went to live with her grandparents. Speaking in a radio interview she is blunt: 'Either I was going to kill him' – she's talking about her father – 'or I was going to move.' Filmed at home with her long-term partner Virginia, Giovanni comes across with tenderness. For fans she has all the time in the world, endlessly smiling for selfies. But clearly she was not a woman to suffer fools; as a documentary subject she is firm with her boundaries, refusing to budge on areas that she deems off-limits – that includes challenges in her childhood and the death of Martin Luther King. Her poems, read by Giovanni herself and the actor Taraji P Henson, made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. There are snippets too from a conversation – televised in 1971 – between Giovanni, still in her 20s, and the writer James Baldwin. Two utterly original and brilliant thinkers, a flicker of recognition sparks between them that here is someone on their level, a match for their fierce intellect. It's electric. Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project is at Bertha DocHouse from 21 March
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nikki Giovanni receives a posthumous honor, the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement
NEW YORK (AP) — Two months after her death, poet Nikki Giovanni has been awarded one of the top honors for her art form, the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. The Poetry Society of America said Wednesday that it had discussed giving the prize to Giovanni before her death. Giovanni died in December and is being honored posthumously. 'Nikki Giovanni loomed as an essential and powerful figure in American literature and culture, the author of three dozen books of poetry, essays, and children's writing,' the poetry society's citation reads in part. 'With insight and stark intelligence, Giovanni's written works articulate the highest hopes of our nation as a land where all are valued and all are free to be themselves and love who they wish to love.' First presented in 1930, the medal is named for Robert Frost and has been given to Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich among others.
Associated Press
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Nikki Giovanni receives a posthumous honor, the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement
NEW YORK (AP) — Two months after her death, poet Nikki Giovanni has been awarded one of the top honors for her art form, the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. The Poetry Society of America said Wednesday that it had discussed giving the prize to Giovanni before her death. Giovanni died in December and is being honored posthumously. 'Nikki Giovanni loomed as an essential and powerful figure in American literature and culture, the author of three dozen books of poetry, essays, and children's writing,' the poetry society's citation reads in part. 'With insight and stark intelligence, Giovanni's written works articulate the highest hopes of our nation as a land where all are valued and all are free to be themselves and love who they wish to love.'
