You're Not Writing So That You Can Write a Best Seller

It feels good and right this week to sit with the beloved writer Nikki Giovanni’s signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She’s also a professor at Virginia Tech, where she brought beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there. And she’s an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to us all — at home in her body and in the world of her lifetime even while she sees and delights in the beyond of it.

Nikki Giovanni is a University Distinguished Professor in the English department at Virginia Tech. She has written and edited numerous books of poetry and works for children, including Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgment, and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Her latest work is Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode Nikki Giovanni — ‘We go forward with a sanity and a love’ Find more at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on March 17, 2016.

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