Renowned poet Nikki Giovanni was no stranger to public speaking.
But then, in summer 2023, after retiring from a 35-year teaching career at Virginia Tech and winning countless awards for her poetry, Giovanni scheduled a speaking engagement with an audience many would find difficult to connect with: middle schoolers.
The students at Tech’s Center for Rural Education SEE VT summer camp were enamored. The young students knew who she was and understood her poetry, said Laura Belmonte, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.
“They were just mesmerized and deeply inspired by her,” she said. Giovanni encouraged them to express themselves creatively and “really embrace their voice in the world. And that’s a pretty powerful message for a young person to get from a global icon.”
Giovanni, the English professor who published more than two dozen books of poetry and 11 illustrated children’s books, died Monday of complications from lung cancer. She was 81.
Giovanni was an integral member of both the global modern literary community and that of Blacksburg. Each April, she presented the Giovanni-Steger Poetry Prize Award to undergraduate students. She created the competition in 2006 with late university President Charles Steger.
“She might have retired, but she certainly never stopped working,” Belmonte said.
Giovanni’s work crossed genres and artforms. Jazz musician and music educator Javon Jackson put Giovanni’s words to music for an album called “The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni” in 2022. Jamie Cheatwood, programming manager at the Jefferson Center in Roanoke, booked them for a stop on tour to promote that album.
“I thought it was such a neat idea to put her poetry to music and that it would have a profound effect on anyone who was lucky enough to hear it,” Cheatwood said.
She recalled a crowd ranging in age from teenagers to people in their 80s. After the show, Giovanni spoke with a long line of young attendees who wanted to meet her, Cheatwood said. “She was just so gentle and so smart and just a joy to have.”
Though at times described as gentle, Giovanni was a fierce advocate. She was a prominent figure of the Black Arts Movement, a Black nationalism movement that developed during the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s. Her poems often addressed issues of race, gender and equity.
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. grew up in Ohio and Tennessee and studied history at Fisk University in Nashville. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, she appeared regularly on public television Black culture show “Soul!” and was well-known among Black artists of the era.
She taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey and Queens College in New York before joining Virginia Tech in 1987 as a visiting professor. She was recruited by Virginia Fowler, a now-retired professor in Tech’s English department, whom she later married. Giovanni and Fowler created the Fowler-Giovanni Fund in 2010 to support visiting scholars and students in the English Department.
In 2005, Giovanni taught a poetry class attended by student Seung-Hui Cho. Cho was disruptive to the point where other students stopped coming to class. When Cho wouldn’t transfer out of the class, Giovanni escalated the issue to her department head. She threatened to resign if he wasn’t removed from her class.
Two years later, Cho shot and killed 32 people and injured 27 others on campus on April 16, 2007.
Steger called to ask her to speak at the memorial service the next day. She wrote late into the night, she recalled to reporter Matthew Bowers of The Virginian-Pilot a year later. “I had just kind of a small poem that just tried to say we’re going to be all right,” she said. President George W. Bush attended the ceremony, as did thousands of people in and outside of Cassell Coliseum.
The poem was met with a long standing ovation and a “Let’s go, Hokies!” chant from the crowd.
The Virginia Tech community frequently cited Giovanni’s speech at that service in comments on Facebook posts announcing her death, with some alumni saying they watch the video of her speech each year on April 16.
But Giovanni made an impact on the Hokie Nation in more private environments, too. Belmonte said the professor spent “a remarkable amount of time” mentoring student-athletes, “to really encourage them to think about their lives beyond the playing field and the court.”
“This was a person who could have taught at any university in the world,” she said. “And she was at Virginia Tech.”
