Award-winning poet, author, and civil rights activist, Nikki Giovanni, was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr,. on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Poet, activist, mother, and professor, Nikki Giovanni is a three-time NAACP Image Award winner and the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry. The author of twenty-seven books and a Grammy nominee for The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, she is the University Distinguished Professor/English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, and an Oprah Living Legend.

WEBSITES:

http://www.nikki-giovanni.com/bio

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nikki-giovanni

https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/nikki-giovanni-39

https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/26/us/naacp-image-awards-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.fisk.edu/

https://vt.edu/

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/lung-cancer.html

VIDEOS:

BOOKS and more……….

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/22050.Nikki_Giovanni

Hip hop speaks to children : a celebration of poetry with a beat 

The historymakers talking truth. Volume 3, Courage [videorecording] 

The Nikki Giovanni poetry collection [sound recording] 

Nikki Giovanni: A poetic force.

Utopian Movements: Nikki Giovanni and the Convocation Following the Virginia Tech Massacre.

“I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.”