Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81

Obituaries|Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81

Nikki Giovanni, the charismatic and iconoclastic poet, activist, children’s book author and professor who wrote, irresistibly and sensuously, about race, politics, gender, sex and love, died on Monday in Blacksburg, Va. She was 81.

The death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of lung cancer, said Virginia C. Fowler, her wife.

Ms. Giovanni was a prolific star of the Black Arts Movement, the wave of Black nationalism that erupted during the civil rights era and included the novelist John Oliver Killens, the playwright and poet LeRoi Jones, later known as the fiery radical Amiri Baraka, and the poets Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez, among others. Like many women in the movement, Ms. Giovanni was confounded by the machismo that dominated it.

Yet Ms. Giovanni was also a star independent of the movement, a celebrity poet and public intellectual who appeared on television and toured the country. She was a riveting performer, diminutive at just 105 pounds — as reporters never failed to point out — her cadence inflected by the jazz and blues music she loved, with the timing of a comedian or a Baptist preacher who drew crowds wherever she appeared throughout her life. She said her best audiences were college students and prison inmates.