Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal, the NAACP Image Award, and has been nominated for a Grammy Award, for her Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has recently been named as one of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 June 1943
CityKnoxville, TN
CountryUnited States of America
The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
If i can't have what i want . . . then my job is to want what i've got and be satisfied that at least there is something more to want
We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.
Now, everything I do, I do because I want to. And I believe the best is yet to come.
If I can't do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I want to do. It's not the same thing, but it's the best thing I can do.
Don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.
The more you love someone the more he wants from you and the less you have to give since you've already given him your love.
I resent people who say writers write from experience. Writers don't write from experience, though many are hesitant to admit that they don't. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears and the fearlessness.
She sounds extremely creative, in that she turned historical figures into mythical figures. Obviously, she's absorbing images and metaphors, and shows she's thinking. What more do we want a seven-year-old to do?
don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.
His headstone said "Free at last, Free at last" - But death is a slave's freedom - We seek the freedom of free men - And the construction of a world - Where Martin Luther King could have lived - and preached non-violence
I'm a big fan of history - applying the lessons as well as the joys and sadness. If we pay attention, we would see how we affect each other. In terms of time, we are not that far from one another. If we were to look back a century, it would seem like a long time; but, if we look at it by decades then it's only 10 years, and by generations it's only five.
Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.