When a family member announced to me that Nikki Giovanni had just died, the news stopped me in my tracks. I forgot what I was doing in the garage. Stunned and knowing Nikki as I did, I thought first that the November 2024 re-election of Donald Trump had literally killed her. For her, he personified the worst that is humanity. She did not mince words. Our friendshipFootnote ¹ began before her unfiltered public grievances with Trump.

As a naïve undergraduate English major taking a poetry class, I was advised by my instructor to write to Ms. Giovanni about my class project on her volume My House. Footnote ² I wrote to many addresses I found in my research since famous folks don’t usually have a single easily accessible address, not really expecting to hear from her. In my letter, I unashamedly asked her to tell me about her poems in this volume:

The naivety and audacity – one might say arrogance – of my youthfulness oozed. Months went by and I never heard from her – several letters returned to me for failed delivery – until I received a handwritten brown and cream heavy stock note card with her photo on it. Her 19 September 1980 handwritten letter (Figure 1) reads:

That she apologizes to me for not responding earlier and offers such encouragement says much about her generosity as a person. Responding within three months was also pretty remarkable. When I wrote to poet/ playwright ntozake shange, shange’s handwritten response came exactly nine months after my initial letters sent in multiple directions to her.

Figure 1.

First handwritten letter from Nikki Giovanni to Neal Lester (19 September 1980).

I had read about Nikki’s mother’s husband Gus’ stroke in an Essence article before receiving her note.Footnote ³ In my final paragraph of that revised undergraduate paper later for a 1983 graduate course, I wrote these prophetic words as I now in 2024 reflect on her life and work on this occasion of her death: “All of Giovanni’s poetry in My House is about love – romantic love between a Black woman and a Black man, the tender love of a mother for her child, or a brotherly-sisterly love she wants for Black people and ultimately for all people… The casual stroll through My House is the poet’s ability … to reveal the true working not only of a stimulated intellect, but more importantly of a throbbing heart.”Footnote ⁴ That began my connection with Giovanni, and our friendship grew thereafter.

When I was Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University (ASU), one of our investors invited Nikki to be the keynoter for the 2011 Annual Jonathan and Maxine Marshall Distinguished Lecture.Footnote ⁵ As lead College administrator for that lectureship activity, I had dinner with Nikki and selected others before the evening event. At dinner, we connected immediately. She was funny, witty, and quite the jester. When I introduced her at the keynote event that evening, I publicly offered the example of my naïve undergraduate inquiry above, and she laughed that she doesn’t do social media or email but that we could become pen pals. That we did for years, resurrecting the lost art of letter writing that only my deceased mom and grandmother and I had shared. I hold Nikki’s handwritten letters, holiday cards, and brief note cards in highest esteem and reflect upon each and every one of them with great fondness.

What I first remember about Nikki’s 2011 keynote, “The Compassion, The Courage, The Challenge of Poetry,” was the Friday night on-campus sold out venue with folks sitting in aisles, violating all manner of building safety protocol. I had never seen so many non-white attendees at a non-sporting campus event. I was so excited about what I had witnessed as a first on our campus that I dashed off an email to our university president celebrating the event success. About her lively presentation, I remember most that she had in the palms of her hands fully engaged the lively multicultural and multigenerational audience joyfully singing Motown classics like Smokey Robinson in unison. What a communal sound that was to behold! She was like a stand-up comic riffing off seemingly anything political and social. She was unapologetic and authentic, and the audience loved her! It was a Friday night house party. Shortly after her visit, the host investors – an adult son and his mother – and I met at their home to simply read Nikki’s poetry aloud from her then new volume Bicycles: Love Poems. Footnote ⁶ Such joy and celebrations we each individually and together experienced merely speaking our breaths into her words while still soaring high on her visit.

In 2012, Nikki invited me to bring students to a celebration of Toni Morrison, whose son had just died. Nikki said that Toni needed to be hugged by the world to which she had given so much. Two ASU students, a community member, and I went to Virginia Tech University – Nikki’s teaching home university – and attended the star-studded literary event, “‘Sheer Good Fortune’: Celebrating Toni Morrison” (16 October 2012), which was a who’s who in the literary world and beyond – all friends of Nikki and Toni – including scholars, authors, and artists, all there to celebrate Morrison and Nikki.Footnote ⁷ I cherish the pre-event dinner with Morrison wherein Nikki sat me at the table with Toni, later admitting in a 21 June 2017 card:

Hundreds of folks who came to celebrate Toni Morrison were also there to celebrate our love for Nikki. In a holiday card to me postmarked 11 December 2015, she wrote:

As Founding Director,Footnote ⁸ I invited Nikki back to ASU in September 2014 for another keynote. This time, I hosted her solo: we did a photo shoot with photographer Rebecca Ross and ate unremarkable food at a downtown Tempe restaurant to which we could walk from my campus office. As we walked and talked, she admitted having recent memory issues, saying that bacteria had gotten into her brain from unclean shower water. She was intellectually alert but repeating herself as though saying some things for the first time. She even accompanied me to a Project Humanities community sharing event, “Celebrate Maya [Angelou]” (17 September 2014) who died on 28 May 2014. As she sat through community members sharing what Angelou’s life and work meant to them, she nodded a lot from her cross-country travel exhaustion. That flight trip from Christiansburg to Roanoke to Charlotte to Phoenix is a day’s work. Yet she persisted, and on the way back to her hotel, she chuckled secretively, having caught much of the public sharing: “Maya fancied herself a good cook, but she was never as good as she thought she was.” Before she left for the airport the next day after her contractual work, she patiently signed and dated all fourteen of the books by her that I had accumulated over the years. Each is addressed to me personally.

This Mesa Arts Center event, “An Evening with Nikki Giovanni” (13 February 2014), included a pre-event reception with investors and supporters, her reading her poetry and interacting with the audience (Figure 2).Footnote ⁹ She was in her element, playful and joking at every turn; demonstrating an accessibility and fondness for strangers who quickly became family and community. When she and I sat down for our one-on-one conversation (Figure 3) on the topic that brought her to Phoenix, I posed this overarching question: “Are we losing our humanity?” Her immediate response was: “When did we ever have it? This history of this country is full of examples of inhumanity from its very start.” She stopped me in my tracks. I then moved differently into our public conversation. At the book signing, thereafter, many of the millennial Black attendees elevated her already high street cred when she proudly displayed and talked about her Tupac ‘Thug Life’ tattoo (Figure 4).Footnote ¹⁰

Figure 2.

Neal A. Lester and Nikki Giovanni embrace at pre-event reception, Mesa Arts Center (Mesa, AZ), 13 February 2014. Photo Credit: ASU Project Humanities.

Figure 3.

Neal A. Lester in conversation with Nikki Giovanni about “Are we losing our humanity?” Mesa Arts Center (Mesa, AZ), 13 February 2014. Photo Credit: ASU Project Humanities.

Figure 4.

Event attendees posing for picture at book signing with Nikki Giovanni and Neal A. Lester as Giovanni shows her “Thug Life” lower arm tattoo. Mesa Arts Center (Mesa, AZ), 13 February 2014. Photo Credit: ASU Project Humanities.

When Nikki learned that I did a research talk on the race and gender politics of hair, Nikki and Ginney Fowler, Nikki’s assistant and wife, invited me in October 2015 to lecture at Virgina Tech University where they both taught. She and Ginney picked me up from the airport in Nikki’s sports convertible and drove me to the campus hotel. The next day, I witnessed Nikki teaching her creative writing course with humor and wit. That evening, I gave a presentation to receptive students, and the next day, Nikki and Ginney invited me to their home. They both explained that they don’t invite everyone into their home – another honor with profound gravity. Lots of fruit trees, a fishpond, and unsurprisingly books – mostly first editions – everywhere. Inside their home, I saw that Nikki collected hippos. Once back in Phoenix from the visit, I sent her a couple of small animals for her collection. Her thank you came in a handwritten note on 10 January 2016:

She and I continued to write each other, nothing profound or earthshattering; just notes to say “hi” and to stay in touch. She consistently referenced Arizona weather, hoping that my family and I would be okay in the summer heat and in the monsoon floodings: “I watch your weather to see if Arizona is burning or flooding. Glad to know you all are all right” (card to author on 14 February 2022).

When I asked Nikki in 2015 to endorse our Project Humanities Humanity 101® principles – compassion, empathy, forgiveness, integrity, kindness, respect, and self-reflection – to promote our Movement to be better and to do better – she agreed immediately, sending these words:

She then offered to get Toni Morrison to endorse our Movement, too, and Morrison did soon thereafter! I suspect that Nikki wrote Toni’s endorsement text, but Toni did in fact sign the endorsement. Their endorsements are literary royalty, alongside the 14th Dalai Lama’s, our first such endorsement.Footnote ¹¹

When I was putting my edited MLA volume on social justice together between 2017 and 2019, I reached out to Nikki for a piece, not necessarily an essay. Anything from her written expressly for this volume would be a plus. She agreed immediately and insisted on getting contacts for Sonia Sanchez and Angela Y. Davis. Nikki revised her piece a couple of times, voluntarily removing her overtly anti-Trump comments. See her piece, “You Do … and So Do We” in my edited volume, Social Justice in Action: Models for Campus and Community. Footnote ¹²

Also a children’s book authorFootnote ¹³ and editor,Footnote ¹⁴ essayist,Footnote ¹⁵ and spoken word performer, Nikki was a people’s poet to her people, though not a poet for all people’s taste. Unlike her close poet friend Maya Angelou, whose smooth calculatedness marked and measured her words, Nikki was boldly irreverent,Footnote ¹⁶ belligerent, and revolutionary. Whenever I teach her poems on love,Footnote ¹⁷ Black love,Footnote ¹⁸ Black self-love,Footnote ¹⁹ Black womanhood,Footnote ²⁰ and Black anger, students and I continually appreciate her truth-telling from a Blackhand side. For those of us who lean into and connect with her words and messages of self-affirmation, she was as bold and uncensored as she was self-deprecating. She loved us – Black people more specifically and humanity more broadly – with all of her heart and soul. She made us laugh and cry. While she demonstrated Black righteous anger at historic domestic terrorism and systemic racism,Footnote ²¹ she hugged us with her emotional vulnerability and accessibility. Poet ntozake shange says that “quite simply a poem shd fill you up with something/ cd make you swoon, stop in yr tracks, change yr mind, or make it up. A poem shd happen to you like cold water or a kiss.”Footnote ²² For so many who are mourning and will continue to mourn her loss, Nikki Giovanni was indeed poetry in motion. In a slightly revised context, she was, in the lyrical sentiment of Carl Carlton in 1981, “a bad mama jama – just as fine as she could be” (Figure 5).Footnote ²³

Figure 5.

Neal A. Lester and Nikki Giovanni. Photo Credit: Rebecca Ross, September 2014.

Now that I have had my own good cryFootnote ²⁴ at the news of Nikki’s death, I can get on with the business of today, reflecting and appreciating her life well lived with grace, passion, honesty, and deep compassion. I knew well that I was not in Nikki’s inner circle of creatives, but she treated me as though I were. I can’t explain why she was willing to invite me into her home and into her life. Our friendship began organically, and her kindness and her big heart allowed me space near her. I am grateful that her piece in my volume is yet another part of her legacy.

I bet she’s in her new ancestral residence trying to find my deceased mom, Johnnie Lee, who was about Nikki’s height and stature and who used to like bragging about herself and her physical prowess: “I’m a little piece of leather, but I’m well put together.” She and Nikki shared that self-confidence boasting that betrayed their small physical builds. My mom and Nikki – though worlds apart in their lives and life choices – are likely together somewhere, sipping champagne and sharing a few laughs about the foolishness of humans thinking that our lives will last forever.