Nikki Giovanni, a prominent poet, civil rights activist and educator, has died at 81. 'We will forever be grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us.'

Legendary poet and civil rights activist Nikki Giovanni got her start while a youngster in Cincinnati's suburbs. 'I am a Cincinnatian,' she said.

Nikki Giovanni died this week, at the age of eighty-one, as that rarest of things: a best-selling poet. Her work burst onto the scene in the nineteen-sixties already fully formed—it was concerned, as much of the Black Arts poetry of the day was,