Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but raised in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. She attended the all-black Fisk University, where she became involved in both the Writers' Workshop and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committe. The connections between literature and politics would continue to absorb her attention for decades to come. In 1967, she became actively involved in the Black Arts movement, a loose coalition of African-American intellectuals who wrote politically and artistically radical poems aimed at raising awareness of black rights and promoting the struggle for racial equality. Radicalized by the assasination of Malcolm X and by the rise of the militant Black Panthers, her poetry in the 1960s and 1970s was colorful and combative; a recurrent theme of this era is the possible redundancy of poetry in the face of possible revolution. Nikki Giovanni is now a professor at Virginia Tech, where she teaches English.