About the Book

This omnibus edition collects celebrated poet and activist Nikki Giovanni’s adult prose: Racism 101, Sacred Cows and Other Edibles and seven (7) selections from Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1971.

Racism 101 (1994) contains essays that indict higher education for the inequities it perpetuates and contemplates the legacy of the 1960s. Giovanni gives searing commentary on Spike Lee and the making of Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, affirmative action, President JFK and the state of urban schools. Racism 101 adds an important chapter to the debate on American national values.

Sacred Cows and Other Edibles (1988) received the Ohioana Library Award. In it Nikki’s esays and articles take on the loftiness of higher education and personal major life crises.

In Gemini (1971), Giovanni explores one of the most tumultuous periods in our history. Her essays take us from her childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, through her work in the Black revolution of the sixties, to her emergence as an acclaimed poet. Nikki interweaves warm recollections of her personal history with incisive vignettes of cultural and political history, including her often surprising opinions of Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Lena Horne, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and others.

Resources

• Reading Guide
• Book Interview
• Sample Embed

Product Details

• ISBN: 9780060541347
• ISBN 10: 0060541342
• Imprint: William Morrow
• On Sale: 12/16/2003
• Pages: 592
• List Price:24.99 CAD
• BISAC1 : SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations
• BISAC2 : SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African Studies
• BISAC3 : HISTORY / African American
• BISAC4 : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / African American & Black
• BISAC5 : HISTORY / Women
• BISAC6 : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
• BISAC7 : SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global)
• BISAC8 : POETRY / Women Authors
• BISAC9 : SOCIAL SCIENCE / Essays
• BISAC10 : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical

Nikki Giovanni

Biography

Nikki Giovanni, poet, activist, mother, grandmother, and educator, was raised in Tennessee and Ohio and graduated with honors from Fisk University in Nashville. The author of over thirty books, she is also the recipient of seven NAACP Image Awards, the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, as well as twenty-seven honorary degrees. She garnered her most unusual honor in 2007 when a South American bat species—Micronycteris giovanniae—was named in celebration of her. A devoted teacher, she spent thirty-five years as University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. She is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Other Works by Nikki Giovanni

• 

  Make Me Rain

  By Nikki Giovanni

• 

  A Good Cry

  By Nikki Giovanni

• 

  Love Poems Vinyl Edition + MP3

  By Nikki Giovanni