81 years old.

npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5222858/nikki-giovanni-poet-obituary

One of the greatest poets and human beings of our lifetime.

Was an inspiration indeed.

Rest in peace

One of the greatest interviews between two great minds ever recorded.

Everybody quotes the “love” part but they wax poetic about so much in this s*** (like church towards the beginning of the interview)

Rip. Had to do a report on this book in middle school. 🙏

Rest in peace, I hope she knows her kind words will be remembered forever

RIP

RIP

Valid

My condolences

Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni,
Turn one page and there's my mommy!

Rest in Peace legend

RIP queen

tryna get to this level where I just talk in prose

RIP to both of these beautiful souls

wow rest in peace

one of my favorite songs/poems of all time, RIP

Rest in peace

RIP queen

The way I feel on repeat

this goes

un autre baobab est tombé 🖤

I'm all for not partaking in hero worship, but between Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Malidoma Patrice Somé, bell hooks, and others, a litany of generation-embodying Black critical luminaries are gone. In a time when our consciousness as Nu Afrikans/“BA”’s is becoming ever more assimilated/integrated. In a time when the counterinsurgent flattening of our history that their works helped many of us witness against — it has yielded never before seen levels of cooption. In a time where open access to information, data, writings, is being eroded or what's available corrupted.
I want to remember them all as flawed human beings apart from how they inspired me. But I also want to name that I mourn not just want they meant to us, but how their deaths coincide with a period in time where what it means to be "us" is becoming so fractured, alien.
It goes to show that the sentiments of a people's struggle cannot be Cephalized; no amount of appealing to the memory of these ancestors can change the fact that the neocolonial embourgeoisiment and fascization just taking shape in their heydey is redefining how we relate to them as well as to ourselves.
Still, it can be true that these personages were entire, three dimensional, complicated human beings and also that they were the visible residues of aspects of a communal struggle/sentiment that is no longer as "foundational" to our people's consciousness today — so it seems.
Ever since Biden wom, I have felt that the cultural effluvium (funk) that I used to draw on when building with people has become much more thin, and it's one of the reasons even the heuristic utility of national consciousness, much less its strategic use, has become less apparent to me.
In the end, it just reinforces to me that the 2020s have ushered us into new terrain, and I'm really looking to the youth bc even as I lament how we're "losing recipes," I know that remnant is being combined with new s*** I couldn't have dreamed of. They'll have to chart their way to becoming their own Baldwins and Marshas and Lorraine's and will likely define themselves beyond such figures. What I hope to do is just model Levelity, practice accountability, and see that my kids will discover their generation's mission.

Well said. This made me reach for Those Who Ride The Night Winds

Rest In Peace to her!

Still can’t believe this damn