In the last years of her life, Nikki Giovanni felt her memory fading. At the beginning of the 2023 documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, she offered an inventive take on how the loss affected her: “I remember what’s important,

Nikki Giovanni died this week, at the age of eighty-one, as that rarest of things: a best-selling poet. Her work burst onto the scene in the nineteen-sixties already fully formed—it was concerned, as much of the Black Arts poetry of the day was,

Nikki Giovanni, the renowned poet and Black queer icon, has died at age 81. Giovanni died Monday in a hospital in Blacksburg, Va., her wife, Virginia C. Fowler, told The New York Times. The cause was complications of lung cancer.