Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81

Nikki Giovanni, the charismatic and iconoclastic poet, activist, children’s book author and professor who wrote, irresistibly and sensuously, about race, politics, gender, sex and love, died on Monday in Blacksburg, Va. She was 81.

Her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of lung cancer, said Virginia C. Fowler, her wife.

Ms. Giovanni was a prolific star of the Black Arts Movement, the wave of Black nationalism that erupted during the civil rights era, propelled by her, the novelist John Oliver Killens, the playwright and poet LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) and the poets Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez, among others. Like many women in the movement, Ms. Giovanni was confounded by the machismo that dominated it.

Yet she was also independent of the movement as a celebrity poet and public intellectual who appeared on television and toured the country. She was a riveting performer, diminutive at 105 pounds — as reporters never failed to point out — her cadence inflected by the jazz and blues music she loved, her timing that of a comedian or a Baptist preacher. She drew crowds wherever she appeared. She said her best audiences were college students and prison inmates.

In 1972, when she was 29, Ms. Giovanni sold out the 1,000-plus seats at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, reading her poems alongside gospel music performed by the New York Community Choir.