Nikki Giovanni, who emerged from the 1960s as one of the leading black poets of revolution, says she remains as radical as ever.
Single motherhood, a bout with lung cancer, showers of literary awards and an academic career have enriched but not blunted her edge, as demonstrated in some of the poems from her latest collection, Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea.
"I'm still anti-war," Giovanni says from her office at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., where she's been an English professor for 16 years. "War is still a bad idea. We've seen what happened in Vietnam, the Gulf. War is not good. War is not romantic. Life should be about something else in 2002."
She does, however, acknowledge that the times have changed. Being radical today has sometimes meant being reduced to voting for Ralph Nader. "Being radical in the 21st century is different from being radical in the '60s," she says. "We're a lot older now.
"I'm comfortable with me," Giovanni says. "I'm 59 years old, I'm past the halfway point. Gloria Naylor told me I am a cultural icon. I said, 'You think so?'
"I'm a midlevel author, not National Enquirer famous. That's nice, too. It gives me a chance to move around in the world and meet people."
Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in 1943 in Knoxville, Tenn., Giovanni attended Nashville's all-black Fisk University, where she edited the literary magazine, graduating in 1967. She was active in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating ComMittee, a civil rights organization that became increasingly radical over the course of its existence.
Outraged by the assassination of Malcolm X and energized by the rise of black militancy, Giovanni began writing poems that were deeply informed by themes of black power and revolutionary change. This period encompasses her first three collections, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), Black Judgment (1968) and Re: Creation (1970).
Giovanni became a chief poetic voice of the Black Arts Movement, a loosely organized aesthetic and political movement that rejected European concepts of art for its own sake, insisting instead that art must benefit and uplift blacks. But that didn't mean Hallmark depictions of black life. Quite the contrary.
"We were comfortable in our own skin," Giovanni says. "We didn't feel like we had to always put our best foot forward. Not all black people are clever and cute. Some are thieves, some are murderers.
"The hip-hop movement took that from us, as we took it from the Harlem Renaissance before us."
Giovanni is an avid supporter of hip-hop music, calling it the modern equivalent of what spirituals meant to earlier generations of blacks. She admires OutKast, Arrested Development, Queen Latifah and, above all, Tupac Shakur.
"We're missing Tupac like my generation missed Malcolm X," she says. "It's been six years and people feel like he was just here. He brought truth and we're still trying to learn what he was trying to teach us."
By the 1970s, single motherhood began to figure in her work. She published several collections of poems for children. She also started giving public readings of her work, which proved extremely popular and provided her with a second career as a spoken-word artist.