Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, is a world-renowned poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. A leading poet of the Black Arts Movement, Giovanni’s work reflects her radical politics. In 1967 she graduated from Fisk University and published her first poetry collection, Black Feeling. It was followed by the poetry collections Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgment (1970). Truth Is on Its Way, a recording of Giovanni reading poems set to gospel and other black music, was a bestseller in 1971.

After the birth of her son in 1969, Giovanni’s work became more personal and less political. In 1989 she began teaching English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni was published in 1996 and Blues for All the Changes: New Poems appeared in 1999.

Over the past thirty years, Nikki’s outspokenness, in her writing and in person, has brought the eyes of the world upon her. One of the most widely read American poets, she prides herself on being “a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English.”  Continue reading →

Fannie M. Jackson Coppin

Fannie M. Jackson Coppin, was not only the first black woman to graduate from college in the United States, but she was also the first woman to head a coeducation institute of learning in the United States.  She enjoyed a long administration in which she managed to make many positive changes for the students at the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Youth(ICY) later to be known as Cheyney University.

Fannie managed to do away with corporal punishment and she established a dialogue between the school and the parents making them more involved in the schooling of their children.  She initiated monthly report cards that reported not only grade marks but conduct marks as well.  Continue reading →