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,

On her visits back to her hometown, Giovanni would stop at the Beck Cultural Exchange Center to look through the archival room at her family's history. Last year, she sent almost 50 boxes of her treasured items to be featured in a permanent exhibit.

Giovanni read her poems about love, nostalgia and race to audiences around the world, but she never stopped loving.