Thirty-five years after her arrival at Virginia Tech, kicking off her legacy of educating college students, Nikki Giovanni is hanging up her hat as an English professor, but the 79-year-old has no plans of slowing down.
The Knoxville native, literary icon, and civil rights fighter is ready to focus on writing books about her childhood, which fans have grown to love.
“It was time. I’m an old woman now, and I hear if you don’t retire, they’ll fire you,” she joked.
But retirement doesn’t stand in the way of her connection to the thousands of young adults she has taught over the years.
“I will always be a Hokie. I will really miss my students more than anything. They keep you so alert about what’s going on right now. I’m a history major and love looking back. I love my generation, but the kids bring you up to date, and they question almost everything. I just truly love them,” she told Knox News.
Found something in common:Nikki Giovanni remembers the time she met Queen Elizabeth
Giovanni is known worldwide as a literary legend, and she’s got the accolades to match. She has received numerous awards, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the inaugural Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Award, the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, seven NAACP Image Awards, a Grammy nomination and many more.
Her published work includes 11 children’s books, three New York Times bestsellers, and a number of essays and recordings. She has received 30 honorary degrees and was named among Oprah Winfrey’s living legends.
Her work spans topics such as race, gender, sexuality, and social issues explored through her poetry, recordings, and nonfiction. She is known as a champion of civil rights and social justice, making her mark during the Black Arts Movement, a section of the Black Power movement that shared many of its ideologies, political beliefs, and cultural practices.
With plans to continue living in Blacksburg, Virginia, and driving her 14-year-old BMW, Giovanni will keep her memories of her time dwelling in Tennessee in her books.
Her newest book, “A Library,” is set to debut this fall at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The picture book recounts her weekly childhood visits to Knoxville’s segregated Carnegie library near her grandmother’s home. The former library was located at the corner of Nelson and East Vine avenues. The library served Knoxville’s Black community as a gathering space and intellectual center founded by educator Charles Warner Cansler.
She fondly remembers it not only as a place for gaining knowledge but also as a venue for imagination and escape.
“I am so thrilled about this book. My grandmother washed clothes on Mondays, and when she did her work at the house, she would take what we called back then as a ‘sit down.’ She would ask me, ‘Don’t you want to return those books?’ … That allowed her just to sit down and not be bothered.
“And I realized I’m one of the few people left who can still write about this. A lot of people don’t know that part of Knoxville,” she said.
Living history:Nikki Giovanni on making amends to Knoxville’s Black families: ‘Apologizing is not going to get it’
Before urban removal ravaged the Black community so city leaders could build the James White Parkway near downtown Knoxville in the 1960s, Giovanni’s grandparents lived at 400 Mulvaney St., at the intersection of Vine Avenue.
Her maternal grandparents, John Brown and Emma Louvenia Watson, were forced out of their home to make way for the highway, eventually moving to Linden Street, but it wasn’t the same as their precious Mulvaney home. Giovanni has recounted numerous memories of her summers and holidays on the former street over her illustrious literary career.
She also recalls the white supremacy she attributes to destroying her family’s home.
“She told me they had to move because of a project,” she said of her grandmother’s explanation.
“If you look at any number of cities where the Black community resides, they are pushed into what’s known as a bad part of the town. Then after Black people make a community out of it, you’ve built a school and had a library, then they want it and decide they are gonna put a highway through it,” she said.
Knoxville hosted Giovanni in spring 2019 to dedicate a plaque at the Cal Johnson Center recognizing her work and the city’s failed attempt at urban renewal.
New book named ‘A Street Called Mulvaney’ is in the works
Born in 1943 at the former Knoxville General Hospital, Giovanni shared with Knox News that she is keeping Knoxville alive with a new title set to be released by 2024.
The title, birthed from her own words, was no coincidence.
“The street called Mulvaney no longer exists. And I just stopped myself and said, ‘That’s my title.’”
Giovanni says the book will center on her childhood remembrances of the days at her grandparent’s house, Mt. Zion Baptist Church, Cal Johnson Park, and the little creek that ran alongside it.
“I wanted to write about my family, my grandmother, and my grandfather. It’s a book of childhood remembrances. Now that Mulvaney no longer exists, I want to write about it. You aren’t dead until you’re forgotten. I didn’t want Mulvaney to be dead,” said Giovanni.
Although she’s leaving her professorship, she still considers herself to be a historian with high hopes that the future generation will be inspired to take over.
“It’s funny, everyone acts like we can go and study history and discover exactly what happened, but in the end, what we end up with is somebody’s memories.”
“I hope other young people reading my book will want to write their memories, too, whether it be about Chicago, St Louis. … I hope that people will realize that our memories are just as important as something you have a record of. I might not have a record, but I know what I remember,” she said.
Giovanni will stay busy traveling around the country, but if it were up to her, she would hit the lottery and open up a little restaurant frying chicken. Or better yet, traveling to outer space, a dream she has had for ages.
“I can’t make that happen anymore. I’m a cancer survivor. I lost my left lung, but if I could, why not? I can dream. I’m going to die anyway, and I would be just as happy in outer space.
“I don’t know how much longer I am going to live. I will be lucky to get into my 80s. You gotta go at some point, you might as well be in the galaxy,” she laughed.
1 Comment
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