To Nikki Giovanni

A letter thanking the poet who wrote us home.

Nikki Giovanni. June 7th, 1943 - December 9th, 2024.

“We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.”

– Nikki Giovanni, National Book Award finalist, NAACP Image Award winner, Langston Hughes Medal recipient, Grammy-nominated poet, celebrated professor, literary legend, revolutionary.

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Dear Ms. Giovanni,

I never got to meet you, not in the way some people meet, where hands shake and voices hum their recognition. But I met you, didn’t I? Through the pen you wielded like a torch, like a wand, like a blade when the world needed sharpening. You didn’t just write poems—you built rooms for us to walk into, to rest in, to rage in, to love in. I stepped into those rooms again and again, never leaving quite the same as I entered.

I remember the first time I met you, even if you weren’t really there. I was in middle school, and my teacher handed me your poem, “Ego-Tripping.” I didn’t know poetry could feel like that—like it was climbing out of the page, standing proud, daring anyone to look away. That poem felt like a drumbeat in my chest, like the pulse of something bigger than me but still mine.

I enjoyed it so much that I decided I wasn’t going to be afraid to read aloud the next time my teacher asked. That might not sound like much, but you have to understand—I was always afraid to read aloud. My mind runs faster than my mouth can keep up. It still happens, even now. Words pile up in my head like a traffic jam, and my tongue tries to catch up but can’t. But that day, with your poem in my hands, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t fumbling. I was invincible.

Some days, I still am.

How do I thank you for that? For letting me sit beside you, poem after poem, as you held the mirror to Blackness and said, “Look. See how beautiful, how complex, how infinite we are.” You took your joy and your pain, your fight and your tenderness, and poured it into the pages, and those pages poured it into us. You made it possible to believe that the word could be a home, even when the world wasn’t.

Did you know you were handing us maps, showing us how to find ourselves when we felt lost? Did you know your words would echo long after you were gone, shaping us, challenging us, calling us to be bolder, softer, freer?

Even though we never met, I feel like I knew you. And maybe that’s the magic of what you gave to the world—you let us know you, the way the moon lets you feel its glow even when it’s distant. You were honest in your brilliance, unyielding in your love for your people, uncompromising in your devotion to truth. Your work has always felt like a hand on my shoulder, guiding me through the fog of this world.

Now you’ve passed on, and the earth feels a little quieter. But your words are loud enough to fill the silence. Your legacy beats like a second heart in those of us who’ve read you, who’ve been changed by you. You showed us how to live unafraid, how to write unafraid, and for that, we will never stop thanking you.

I wrote something for you, please let me know what you think of it when we finally meet:

sleep well, Ms. Giovanni

you sat the stars down and taught them how to wink,
wrapped the moon in your laughter, sent it spinning,
a love supreme floating through the quiet corners
of our kitchen sinks and subway cars.

and hot combs, and durags, and cognac,
and linen suits, and church hats, and thug life,
and all the shit they said was too Black.

you made poetry the blood,
made it the marrow—
the way we hold our babies close
or kiss the air when no one’s looking.
you wrote us whole,
even when we were breaking.

your words, a song—soft and unyielding—
Marvin Gaye on sunday mornings
and on protest lines.
you whispered to the shadows,
told them they were still made of light.

you told the south to sing,
told the north to dance,
held the universe in a mason jar,
and said, “look, this is ours.”

somewhere, beneath a magnolia tree,
your voice is still planting itself,
still pulling love out of the dirt,
still teaching us how to bloom.

With love and thanks,
Frederick

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5 Essential Nikki Giovanni Poems

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