Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal, the NAACP Image Award, and has been nominated for a Grammy Award, for her Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has recently been named as one of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 June 1943
CityKnoxville, TN
CountryUnited States of America
We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I'll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn't. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.
To write poems, I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.
You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.
The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.
She sounds extremely creative, in that she turned historical figures into mythical figures. Obviously, she's absorbing images and metaphors, and shows she's thinking. What more do we want a seven-year-old to do?
She doesn't have a lot of attitude. She was going about her business, and she was within her rights to be where she was. She wasn't trying to lead. She simply said, 'Enough. Here I stand.' I think people need to know that.
it's a sex object if you're pretty and no love or love and no sex if you're fat
When you are skinning your customers, you should leave some skin on to grow again so that you can skin them again.
If you know what you're talking about, or if you feel that you do, the reader will believe you.