Good grief - she looks just like that very weird “gender-bender” prof with the short cropped blonde curly hair and the long-sleeved shirt, man’s jacket and tie. Same person?
Yes, the same person.
The posted picture of Giovanni was decades old. I had occasion to meet Giovanni about ten years ago. She’s a terrible poet, a left-winger and certainly no clothes horse — she was worried that day because the jacket she had brought looked shabby. In spite of all this, she is quite outgoing and personable. She speaks her mind and has many interests in common with young people — follows sports, music and so on. I would imagine she is quite popular on campus.
No, she’s certainly not blonde. Wikipedia says that she’s known as “The Princess of Black Poetry.” And of course she’s politically correct in every other way. Pro-gay, against traffic in elephant ivory, etc., etc.
Here’s a partial list of her books:
Black Feeling, Black Talk (1967)
Black Judgement (1968)
Re: Creation (1970)
Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis (1970) (Illustrated by Charles Bible)
My House (1972)
The Women and The Men (1975)
The Women Gather (1975) Broadside
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978)
Those Who Ride The Night Winds (1983)
Spin a Soft Black Song (1987)
Sacred Cows and Other Edibles (1988)
Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People (1993)
Racism 101 (1994)
Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking At The Harlem Renaissance Through Poems(1996)
The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996)
The Sun is So Quiet (1996) (Illustrated by Ashley Bryan)
Love Poems (1997)
The Genie in the Jar (1998)
Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems (1999)
Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems (2002)