Nikki Giovanni was the epitome of what we Jamaicans call Talawa, small but mighty. I told her so when we spoke in February. She had a reputation for scolding interviewers when they strayed or said something stupid. I was nervous but needn’t have been. Giovanni had a slow-rising smile that emitted warmth, even as she told me, apparently to put me at ease, “Remember, the door is always open, if you don’t like what you’re hearing you can always walk away.”
Her poetry emerged from the fire and rage that fuelled the civil rights movement. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, her poem Reflections on 4 April 1968 asked:
