Nikki Giovanni’s Lasting Impression
Dear Saint Mary's Friends,
As 2024 was coming to an end, news broke about the death of American poet Nikki Giovanni at the still-too-young age of 81. Giovanni, who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee but grew up in Cincinnati, was a poet of remarkable scope—her focus ranging from the smallest details of her grandmother’s kitchen to the wider African American experience, from familial intimacies to political movements, from the ground under her feet to imagined worlds.
She was in many ways a public poet, a master of the spoken word. Some of you may remember that Giovanni was a professor at Virginia Tech University when they suffered the terrible shooting incident that killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in 2007. The shooter had been a student in one of her earlier classes. She wrote a beautiful and unifying poem called “We Are Virginia Tech” that she read at the campus convocation the day after the awful carnage, and that event was covered by cable news stations and networks, bringing her brave and resonant voice into America’s living rooms.
Some of you may also remember that I read Nikki Giovanni’s poem “A Journey” as part of my inauguration address at Saint Mary’s in 2021. She perfectly expressed the journey I believed we were all embarking on together at Saint Mary’s, a journey of discovery and invention where I would be “not the guide” but “your fellow passenger.” I return to that poem regularly.
But a few days after news broke about Giovanni’s death, I learned something I didn’t know. Mary Lu Bilek ’77 wrote to ask if I had heard the news, and she said: “Just an FYI, Nikki came to St. Mary’s in 1976 or 1977, hosted by Student Government.” Of course, I shouldn’t have been at all surprised: Saint Mary’s has a vibrant history of inviting important writers, artists, and thinkers to campus. And Nikki Giovanni, who thought so deeply about women’s experiences, was a natural choice for students who wanted to give voice to their own experiences.
Her poems honor strong women in so many ways. There are several that read like recipes from her grandmother, and she said to podcaster Krista Tippett in a 2016 “On Being Project” conversation: “My grandmother did not waste. There was nothing that came into her kitchen that she didn’t find a use for. And I feel the same way with experience and with words.” In her poems, she recalls exactly how to clean collard greens, and what to cook with bay leaves, and the difference between her own lumpy grits and her grandmother’s smooth ones. “You’re always doing the best that you can do,” she mused to Tippett, “and you’re always taking whatever ingredients you’re given and making whatever it is that you can make.”
In that same interview, she talks about the strength of Saint Mary and about Mary’s importance in the Christian faith. She asks, “[W]hy it is that we don’t actually look into the manger more? We always look at the cross.” And she proffers that “one of the problems with the manger is that we have to give Mary credit for bringing God to Earth.” She credits Mary as the inspiration for women who give birth to a baby or who bring to life new ways of doing and being in the world. She says, “I do know this from Mary, and I’m gonna give Mary credit—having a baby hurts.” And we know that the journey from the manger to Calvary brought Mary excruciating suffering.
Giovanni did have a child, but she also gave metaphorical birth to new forms and themes in literature and to unique women’s perspectives. For the SMC generation in the 1970s—and still today—she is an important figure, one in the long line of inspiring women who have visited the College and shared their artistic gifts. As I look ahead over the next months, I see on the calendar yet another set of remarkable visitors on the horizon. On February 11, the Francis A. McAnaney Humanities Lecture will present an evening of conversation with Madeline Miller, best-selling author of Circe and Song of Achilles, and Emily Wilson, the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer's Odyssey. On April 3 we will welcome Kristin Kobes Du Mez, historian, researcher, and author of The New York Times bestseller Jesus and John Wayne. And on April 10, we will celebrate the 40-year anniversary of the Madeleva Lecture when Prof. Kathleen Sprows Cummings, PhD, the Rev. John A. O'Brien Collegiate Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame, will deliver a talk entitled “Holy Women Making History.”
Once again, we recognize women who have produced something new and compelling, and who will share it with this generation of Saint Mary’s students, with alumnae, and with community members.
I hope many of you will join us for these events—some of them will be available online.
Warm regards,
Katie Conboy, Ph.D.
President
January 31, 2025