Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories about the Keepers of Our Traditions - Paperback

by Nikki Giovanni (Author), Nikki Giovanni (Editor)

The acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni created this book by asking her friends--writers like Gloria Naylor, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maxine Hong Kingston--for their stories and recollections of their grandmothers, then to a group of writers in their nineties for their thoughts.

Grand Mothers celebrates those special women in every culture who preserve heritage and prepare the future.

Author Biography

Nikki Giovanni wrote many books of poetry for children and adults, including Rosa, a Caldecott Honor book, Lincoln and Douglass, The Genie in the Jar, and Ego-tripping and Other Poems for Young People. Giovanni called herself, "a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English." She was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Lincoln Heights, an all-black suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. She studied at Fisk University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. She published her first book of poetry, Black Feeling Black Talk, in 1968, and since then became one of America's most widely read poets. Oprah Winfrey named her as one of her twenty-five "Living Legends." Her autobiography Gemini was a finalist for the National Book Award, and several of her books received NAACP Image Awards. She received twenty-five honorary degrees, and numerous other distinctions, including being named Woman of the Year by Mademoiselle Magazine, The Ladies Home Journal and Ebony, the first recipient of the Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Award, and the Langston Hughes Medal for poetry. Nikki Giovanni lived in Christiansburg, Virginia, where she was a professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. She died in 2024 at the age of 81.