Nikki Giovanni, 2015

With a long writing career that stretches back to the 1960s and the Black Art Movement, Nikki Giovanni has nearly three dozen books of poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, and children’s stories with numerous honors, including the American Book Award in 2008 for The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. She reads from her more recent books Chasing Utopia, Bicycles, and Acolytes, and talks about the influence of history, food, community and family on her work as she looks back over her five decades as a poet. A professor at Virginia Tech, where she and Professor Virginia Fowler, her literary critic and author of Nikki Giovanni, have established The Answer is Yes Fund.