IB English IV_Nikki Giovanni's bio

Well here's something interesting to stimulate the IB English minds:

                    Did you know Nikki Giovanni's real name is Yolanda Cornelia Giovanni? She changed her name to reflect her as an individual and reinvention of herself!

Nikki Giovanni was born in the country of Knoxville, Tennessee on June 7, 1943. However, she was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. She then entered the HBCU route and entered Fisk University for her undergraduate education. During the time of her undergraduate education, she worked with the school's Writer's Workshop and edited the literary magazine. After recieving her bachelors degree in 1967, she organized the Black Arts Festival in Cincinnati. Thus, led her into graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.

Nikki Giovanni is a poet! Her style of writing is mainly, Topicality writing. She is grounded to the historical era and emotion she feels when writing her poetry. 

Giovanni's first two collections of poetry were Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgement (1969). This was then Giovanni began in her passion for writing on reflections on the African-American identity. Lately, she published  Bicycles: Love Poems (William Morrow, 2009); Acolytes (HarperCollins, 2007); The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 (2003); Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not-Quite Poems (2002); Blues For All the Changes: New Poems (1999); Love Poems (1997); and Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996).

                  Did you know that Giovanni has a tattoo that says "Thug Life" in honor of Tupac Shakur? Did you also know that Giovanni became a poet because she enjoyed reading the African-American pioneers of Literature like Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.

In honor of her survival, Giovanni wrote an anthology Breaking the Silence: Inspirational Stories of Black Cancer Survivors (Hilton Publishing, 2005). She has been honored multiple times, including three NAACP Image Awards for Literature in 1998, the Langston Hughes award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters in 1996. She also has over twennty honorary degees from national colleges and universities. She is more importantly contributed for becoming the first recipient of teh Rosa Parks Woman of Gourage Award in the category of Spoken Word and becoming African American Literature's Woman of the Year.