Nikki Giovanni: "We find the song in the darkest days"

From the New York Times:

"Over the course of her 52-year career, Nikki Giovanni has written 12 children’s books and eight nonfiction books, and she has released 10 spoken word albums. But the genre for which she is best known is poetry.

When you flip through a stack of her 19 collections (it’s a tall stack), you find her face, still radiant and smiling at 77, staring back at you from the covers. This is an unusual choice for the jacket of a poetry book, but Giovanni is the rare poet whom a good number of people will actually recognize — a distinction that is all the more noteworthy considering how long it has been true.

She was name-checked in the 1980 Teena Marie song “Square Biz,” featured in the Afropunk Festival in Brooklyn in 2016, and both seen and heard reading her poem “Dream” last fall in a campaign ad for Joseph R. Biden Jr. It was 1972 when Ebony magazine first called her “a personality, a star.” Her staying power over half a century comes from a stream of acclaimed work, her proclivity for a punishing schedule of tours and readings, and a fearlessness born of not caring what foolish people think.

“The best thing you can do for yourself is to not pay attention,” Giovanni said during a video interview from her home in Christiansburg, Va."

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/books/nikki-giovanni-make-me-rain.html

Listen to a wonderful interview with Nikki Giovanni and Neil Pasricha   https://www.3books.co/chapters/65