Entertainment
Appreciation: Nikki Giovanni made me a poet. Listen, and she'll still make you one too
“You sound like a poet.”
When Nikki Giovanni uttered these words in January 2007 at the end of a two-hour interview, she shifted my life’s focus from covering the news to making art with it. Her matter-of-fact declaration offered me what she gave millions of readers, students and fellow artists for nearly 60 years: faith.
On that day, I followed Nikki’s careful instructions to type and collate the lines of poetry I’d scrawled in composition books and notepads for years and leave the rest to her. Less than three months later, I confronted my fear of my artistic shortcomings and chose faith in what I could accomplish outside that Atlanta newsroom, enrolling in the nascent MFA program at Virginia Tech, where Nikki — always, she insisted, just Nikki — was a distinguished creative writing professor for more than three decades.
I accepted admission three months later, on April 16, the day that Tech — and the world — was stunned by horrific violence committed by a student Nikki had banned from her class. While reporting about that student killing 32 Hokies and himself and wounding 17, I decided I would believe in her faith in my Southern-bred listening and wordcraft to make a career of writing poems informed by my journalism training, her take-no-prisoners honesty and boundless compassion my compass. Somehow, she knew I’d also gained the tools I needed by, like her, observing the women and the men in Baptist churches step out on faith to share their testimonies.
“The answer is always yes,” she’d intone when I’d call. “You can always change your mind later if it’s not working out.”
This infectious, uncompromising faith in humanity’s potential to choose good and embody the power of divined words made flesh, coupled with unapologetic self-possession and a generosity of spirit, heralds our Nikki as arguably America’s most accessible voice and certainly one of the most prophetic of this millennium. For Nikki, who died Monday at 81, our future depends upon our willingness to learn from everyday Black folks’ refusal to accept status-quo cruelties as incontrovertible realities. Time and again, her poems land on faith as the fuel to catapult us to a yonder she’s dreamed of exploring since her girlhood in Knoxville and Cincinnati.
Since I left the mad-dash newspaper assembly line, Nikki has remained my North Star. When a car accident threw my grad school budget into a tailspin, most friends shrugged, but without my asking, she saw to it that, within hours, I got a call from an administrator about a grant that would cover the repair cost. When my mother was stricken with cancer and I told Nikki that I’d need an academic leave, she offered an independent study on the Black Arts Movement she’s helped define and scheduled our meetings around Mama’s care. (She’d made sacrifices for family, too, and didn’t want me enduring any of the delays she had.)
After I graduated from Tech, earned a doctorate in literary, gender and sexuality studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and became a professor at Wake Forest University, hatemongers sent threatening emails to faculty of color. I wanted to leave the university, where her sister-friend Maya Angelou had taught for decades, but Nikki texted via her partner of nearly 40 years, Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, that I should reconsider: “Take your smile and your love to the folk who love you. Maya was your aunt and I am your godmother … let’s be strong on this one ❤️ .”
You may be wondering why so many from all walks of life are grieving so intensely this week. It’s that stories like mine are at once remarkable and ubiquitous. We’ve watched Nikki appoint, anoint and empower so many, always saying yes and wanting to know: Who should the world be reading, watching and listening to next? As we, her colleagues and literary children, gave her the early works of Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Remica Bingham-Risher and others known primarily in academic circles at the time, she called them into her orbit, too, putting the everyday people she’s engaged for three generations on notice to look out for who’ll next storm the castle and put a mirror up to the naked emperor while shimmying and wisecracking as only the folk can. Look at what our grandmothers’ prayers have wrought, she beamed in anthologies she curated and massive group readings she coordinated to give writer-friends Angelou, Toni Morrison and E. Lynn Harris and actors Ruby Dee and Novella Nelson their flowers while they lived and to comfort those left behind when beloved poet Lucille Clifton departed too soon.
Nikki Giovanni, second from left, at the unveiling of the Maya Angelou stamp in 2015. With her are, from left, Howard University professor Eleanor Traylor, First Lady Michelle Obama, Postmaster General Megan Brennan, Oprah Winfrey and artist Ross Rossin.
(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)
Wherever Nikki alights is a space to laugh, play the dozens (preferably over bid whist), celebrate and, yes mourn and sing with these and other giants. And she’s brought along as many of us who would trust her to lead the way she’s blazed unassumingly, Ginney at her side, their love a model for our beleaguered LGBTQIA youths, unashamed but fiercely protected until it was time for the world to know. “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” which won an Emmy this year, leaves few relevant questions unanswered, so if you’re just taking note of the Nikki rocket ship, start there to fine-tune your own voices.
Nikki loved a good song, preferably jazz, with some Champagne and a meal seasoned with the lavender she grew in her garden. But let’s not forget: She was down with hip-hop when Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was a tot and others decried the music as earworm “gangsta rap” that would kill and destroy, not galvanize, the coming generation for whom he — like she — is a folk hero. “I’m a thug,” she’d tell anyone who would listen, showing off the “Thug Life” tattoo emblazoned on her left arm after Lamar’s predecessor, Tupac Shakur, was murdered in 1997, just as hip-hop began topping pop charts and commanding the zeitgeist. In one memorable moment in 2013 I’ve been replaying to hear her alto lilt and girlish chuckle, she tells tastemaker radio DJ Sway Calloway she’s happily at once “a little, old lady” and all that “I’m a thug” encompasses. For those who might become prodigal, choosing to go our own way, Nikki is always waiting with seats at her welcome table when we’re ready to embrace the good sense she and other elders and ancestors impart.
For, like poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks and another singular supernova, Prince, the latter two of whom shared her birthday, Nikki has always communed with like-minded iconoclasts and what she called “space freaks,” those who understand that our songs of rage, rapture, irreverence and yearning are our greatest, Blackest weapons. From her earliest collections “Black Feeling, Black Talk,” and “Black Judgement” in the late 1960s to her most recent ones, “A Good Cry” (2017) and “Make Me Rain,” published in 2020, that annus mirabilis of pestilence and prosperity, her refusal to surrender to despair kept her going — and current.
When we phoned for that 2007 interview, she was promoting “Acolytes,” which she’d written as first her mother, then her sister and aunt, lay dying within months of one another. Amid her own journey with illness, including the one that’s ended her physical journey on this side of forever, Nikki has found in grief and pain an exacting clarity to declaim that faith, like the unconditional love she gives to those who choose her back, only dies when we stop believing. Anticipating our grief, she leaves us this conversation on unconditional love’s liberating power with the New Yorker’s Doreen St. Felix and host Bianca Vivion and her biographical documentary as an example of how to live a freer life of constant evolution, its title drawn from a poem in “Acolytes,” “Quilting the Black Eyed Pea,” in which she presaged “we’re going to Mars” long before billionaires contemplated colonizing outer space.
Now it’s our turn to join Nikki’s song as her spirit, finally boundless and fully free, soars into the cosmos. Even as Octavia Butler’s dystopian vision in “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talent” unfolds, with the unhoused and most vulnerable criminalized and Earth’s hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis giving us a hard look in the mirror of what we’ve done, we should not run from fear of what we’re forced to face. Nikki’s poem “Fear: Eat in or Take Out,” which she read during a 2017 TED Talk, teaches us “to distill fear,” rather than let any powers-that-be persuade us to mix our fear with the hate that empowers them to divide and conquer us all. We must, as Nikki told us in that TED Talk, “learn to distill fear,” rather than let any powers-that-be persuade us to mix our fear with the hate that empowers them to divide and conquer us all.
Defying the unconscionable indignities that loom, I’ve been clinging to Nikki’s voice, and it’s everywhere, y’all.
Search for her online and heed her call: Take your smile and your love to the folk who love you. You and you and you sound like a poet, too.
L. Lamar Wilson, the 2024-2025 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University, is a professor of creative writing, literature and film studies at Florida State University. He is the author of “Sacrilegion” (Blair, 2013) and the associate producer of “The Changing Same” (PBS/POV Shorts, 2019), a collaboration with Rada Film Group, the director-producers of “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.”
Entertainment
‘Children of Blood and Bone’ author won’t see film after feud with star Amandla Stenberg
Tomi Adeyemi, the author of the bestselling fantasy “Children of Blood and Bone,” isn’t planning to see the forthcoming film adaptation — even though she co-wrote it.
Over the weekend, the Nigerian American author posted a video on TikTok addressing fans who have been asking her the same question, “Why don’t you post about the adaptation of your first film adaptation anymore?”
“There is a reason I will not post anything about the adaptation of my work,” the author wrote in what appear to be screenshots of a group chat. “I have not seen the film, and I will not watch it.”
The adaptation of the first installment of Adeyemi’s “Legacy of Orïsha” fantasy trilogy is slated to hit theaters in January 2027. Gina Prince-Bythewood — who wrote and directed “Love & Basketball” and helmed “The Woman King” — is directing. The film stars Amandla Stenberg, Thuso Mbedu, Tosin Cole, Damson Idris, Cynthia Erivo, Lashana Lynch, Regina King, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Viola Davis.
Alongside the screenshots of her comments in the group chat, she shared a February 2025 exchange with Stenberg that shows the author severing ties with the actor.
Adeyemi shared only her final message to Stenberg, which reads, “Do not ever use my name in an interview or video again. Do not text me. Do not call me.” That exchange is followed by a notification that she blocked Stenberg, who plays Princess Amari in the upcoming fantasy flick.
The message from Stenberg that preceded Adeyemi’s reply is not shown in full.
Stenberg, who played Rue in “Hunger Games,” Starr Carter in “The Hate U Give” and, recently, Verosha “Osha” Aniseya and Mae-ho “Mae” Aniseya in Disney’s “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” had been getting flack from readers of the series, who claimed colorism was an issue while casting the movie.
In February 2025, Stenberg posted a since-deleted nine-minute TikTok addressing the controversy and told followers that Adeyemi had given the actor her blessing when cast as the series’ princess.
“I am four months into training for ‘Children of Blood and Bone’ and I am getting my ass whooped,” Stenberg joked in the video, per BET.
“This year was mostly defined for me, honestly, by contending with what it felt like to receive racist death threats just for existing in the ‘Star Wars’ universe, and that was a really difficult thing for me to move through,” she continued. “But honestly, it feels so much more painful for me to feel like I’m at odds with my own community.”
Stenberg said that she considers her skin tone when navigating her career choices and would “never go after a role” she didn’t feel well suited for. “I know that colorism is an insidious system that relentlessly impacts every facet of entertainment.”
The actor continued that it was actually a meeting with the “Children of Blood and Bone” author that gave her the confidence to pursue the role.
“I had the opportunity to meet Tomi, the novelist, for the first time. … And she goes, ‘Amandla, I want you to know that when you were a little girl and you were cast as Rue in “The Hunger Games,” and people said that Rue’s death wouldn’t be as sad because you’re a Black girl — that inspired me to write this series so that Black girls like you and Black girls of all shades could have a story written about them,’” Stenberg said in the video. “We started crying, and I said to myself, ‘God wants me here.’”
Representatives for Stenberg, Adeyemi and Prince-Bythewood did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
Movie Reviews
‘Night Nurse’ Review: A Caretaker Explores Her Kink for Elder Abuse in the Year’s Strangest Erotic Thriller
There are any number of erotic thrillers in which rich old men are robbed blind and/or left for dead, but Georgia Bernstein’s admirably bizarre “Night Nurse” might be the first movie of its kind where elder abuse is the source — and possible subject— of its erotic thrills. If there are others, I’m not sure I want to know.
But this woozy debut feature doesn’t rely on its audience being turned on by the relationship between a nubile caretaker and her dementia-addled patient. Their psychosexual bond, meanwhile, hinges on cold-calling vulnerable old people under the guise of a grandchild in financial distress. (“I’m in trouble, nana, send me $10,000 or I’ll be left to rot in jail!” That sort of thing). With its slim wisp of a premise stretched into a Strickland-esque dreamscape that substitutes kink for conflict, the film itself hardly seems convinced by its own wrinkled lust — all desperate kisses and non-touching poses of subservience. More important to Bernstein is what that lust reveals about her characters’ deepest needs, specifically how their need to care and be cared for can be as easily perverted as any other form of desire.
As moody and weightless as the noir-accented score that blows through the movie like a curlicue gust of wind in an old cartoon (credit to musicians Sam Clapp and Steven Jackson), “Night Nurse” lacks the pulse required for its stray feelings to come alive. Still, the film ambiently taps into the latent eroticism of teasing out the distance between how you see yourself and who you really are. Bernstein plays with that distance like a telephone cord wrapped around her fingers, and Eleni — played by the excellent newcomer Cemre Paksoy, powerfully helpless — only frays even more as the receiver is brought near the hook. “Everything I did before today wasn’t me,” the nurse tells co-worker Mona (Eleonore Hendricks) after starting a new job at an Illinois retirement home. “It was somebody else.”
What she did before today remains unexplored (specifically, what she did to get herself fired from her last gig), but I’m guessing she’s probably changed less than she thought. There’s a faraway flicker in her eyes the moment she catches the vibe between Mona and Douglas (a ribald and elusive Bruce McKenzie), a white-haired seventysomething who shows early signs of dementia but still commands an undiminished sexual energy. “I’m not an invalid,” he coos as Mona bathes him in the tub, to which she replies, “yes, you are,” in a supplicant tone that hints at a rich history of power games between them.
Later that same night, Douglas will force Eleni to call a stranger, pretend that she’s their granddaughter, and ask for money — he’ll wrap the phone cord around the nurse’s body as she talks and shove her against the wall as they kiss. She’s into it. So into it that he has to clarify the terms of his whole deal: “If you’re looking for a pogo stick, I’m really not your guy.” But Eleni isn’t looking for anything to bounce on. She just wants to be needed, and maybe to need someone in return. Someone who will see her for who she really is and allow her the fantasy of pretending she isn’t being herself when she cons vulnerable strangers out of their money — when she exploits how enthralled those strangers are by the care they have for their loved ones.
“Night Nurse” doesn’t belabor the psychology, as Bernstein prefers to express her story through heavy-lidded suggestion. Somnambulating from the moment it starts, the film moves through a series of beautifully arranged poses that stretch their latent meaning thin across the surface (Lidia Nikonova’s cinematography lacquers every shot with a seductive dreaminess). We see Douglas smoking in a lawn chair with Mona and Eleni curled around his feet. Eleni riding in the backseat of a convertible as the wind blows through her curls. The full staff of nurses — all of them under Douglas’ sway — stumbling around his condo in a state of zonked out bliss as they roll on the prescription drugs they’ve stolen from the residents.
Once you’ve seen one shot of this movie, you’ve practically seen them all, at least until things escalate during a rushed and unsatisfying third act that forces Eleni into an honest confrontation with herself. People will do just about anything to feel needed — they’ll give whatever degree of care allows them to receive it in return. “Night Nurse” understands that desire, but remains far too numb to treat it.
Grade: C+
The Independent Film Company will relase “Night Nurse” in theaters on Friday, July 10.
Entertainment
Lucas Museum to give free annual passes to South L.A. neighbors, host community preview day
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is moving at light speed toward its Sept. 22 opening, announced Thursday that it will give free annual passes to its South L.A. neighbors living in the 90037 ZIP Code. The 300,000-square-foot, $1-billion museum located in Exposition Park will also host a special community preview day on Sept. 13, more than a week before the general public gets to step inside.
The 90037 ZIP Code has a population of more than 65,000 and is bordered roughly by the 110 Freeway to the west, Slauson Avenue to the south, Central Avenue to the east and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to the north. Residents can register for passes at lucasmuseum.org/lm37 and will be alerted in August when the program launches. Pass holders can reserve tickets for themselves and one guest.
Tickets for non-pass holders go on sale July 21. They cost $25 for adults and $21 for seniors. Kids 17 and under are free.
“Storytelling has the power to bring people together and create a sense of community,” said Lucas Museum Chief Executive Tracey Bates in a news release about the program. “Through LM37, we are inviting our South Los Angeles neighbors to make the museum part of their lives and take their own path of discovery through the art, programs and experiences that will help shape this new cultural hub for Los Angeles.”
The community preview day is designed to give local business owners, community partners, civic leaders and registered LM37 pass holders a sneak peak of the 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, as well as the expansive gardens with 11 acres of park space.
The opening programming, curated by co-founder George Lucas, features 20 inaugural exhibitions across more than 30 galleries, including one titled “Star Wars in Motion,” containing vehicle designs, high-speed racers, flying vessels, props, costumes and illustrations from the first six films in the beloved franchise.
More than 1,200 objects will be on display from Lucas’ personal collection of narrative art. Highlights include work by Norman Rockwell and Dorothea Lange, as well as a variety of manga, children’s book illustrations and comics.
-
World3 minutes agoHoops Players’ Win Tops Big Day in NCAA Eligibility Litigation
-
Health27 minutes ago3 Best Peptides for Weight Loss—and the Viral One Doctors Say To Skip
-
Lifestyle43 minutes agoSmithsonian chief emphasizes ‘accuracy and integrity’ after White House report
-
Technology55 minutes agoMicrosoft’s carbon emissions went up 25 percent last year
-
World58 minutes agoJailed Catholic woman’s hunger strike highlights Iran religious persecution — US demands action
-
Politics1 hour agoIsrael shares intelligence warning Iran plotted new assassination attempt against Trump: report
-
Health1 hour agoParasitic infection causing ‘explosive’ stomach illness exceeds 1,000 cases in northern state
-
Sports1 hour agoLondon descends into disorder as Morocco fans flood streets after World Cup elimination by France
