Nikki Giovanni died this week, at the age of eighty-one, as that rarest of things: a best-selling poet. Her work burst onto the scene in the nineteen-sixties already fully formed—it was concerned, as much of the Black Arts poetry of the day was,

Nikki Giovanni, the legendary poet and leader of the Black Arts Movement, died at 81 on Monday, Dec. 9 in Blacksburg, Va., after receiving a third diagnosis of cancer, according to news reports. Her longtime partner,