Black Judgement.

Nikki Giovanni (born 1943) is one of the most celebrated and enduring voices in American poetry — a writer whose career, spanning more than five decades, has moved from the fierce political urgency of the Black Arts Movement to a broader, more intimate exploration of love, memory, community, and the texture of African American life. Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, and educated at Fisk University, she emerged as a major literary figure in 1968 when she self-published her debut collection Black Feeling, Black Talk — noting that no one was much interested in a Black girl writing what was called "militant" poetry, so she formed a company and published herself. She used the proceeds from that collection and a grant from the Harlem Arts Council to publish a second collection months later, Black Judgement, which sold 6,000 copies in its first three months and contains "Nikki-Rosa" — a poem poet Margaret Walker called Giovanni's signature work, an intimate defense of her own childhood in which "Black love is Black wealth." Together the two collections were eventually published in a single volume that electrified generations with its revolutionary phrases and is widely regarded as one of the single most important volumes of modern African American poetry. A three-time NAACP Image Award winner, the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and holder of the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, Giovanni served for many years as University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech and has been described by Gloria Naylor as one of our national treasures — a judgment that her sustained body of work across more than twenty-seven books has done nothing to contradict.