A Good Cry
Description
Poet, firebrand, mother, radical, healer, and sage, Nikki Giovanni has always been celebrated for her inspired and courageous voice. For decades, she has spoken out on the sensitive issues—race and gender, violence and inequality—that touch our national consciousness.
As energetic and insightful as ever, Nikki Giovanni now offers us an intimate and affecting look at her personal history and the hidden corners of her own heart. In A Good Cry, she takes us into her confidence, describing the joy and peril of aging and recalling the violence that permeated her parents’ marriage and her childhood. She pays homage to the people who have given her life meaning and delight: her grandparents, who took her in and saved her life; the poets and thinkers who have influenced her; and the students who have surrounded her. Giovanni also celebrates her good friend, Maya Angelou, and the many years of friendship, poetry, and kitchen-table laughter they shared before Angelou’s death in 2014.
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Nikki Giovanni (1943–2024), poet, activist, mother, grandmother, and educator, grew up in Tennessee and Ohio and graduated with honors from Fisk University in Nashville. The author of over thirty books, she was also the recipient of seven NAACP Image Awards, the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, the Frost Medal, as well as thirty-one honorary degrees and an Emmy Award. She garnered her most unusual honor in 2007 when a South American bat species—Micronycteris giovanniae—was named in celebration of her. A devoted teacher and honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., she spent thirty-five years as University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.