Is Nikki Giovanni married? The poet’s love life detailed

Nikki Giovanni has written about nearly everything under the sun: love, parenthood, social justice, nature – you name it. She gained fame in the late 1960s, writing about the Black Power Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. Consequently, Nikki became one of the first authors of the Black Arts Movement. 

Nikki Giovanni is unmarried; she has a son named Thomas Watson Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni is not married. She told Ebony Magazine that she wanted children but didn’t want to get married. In 1969, she welcomed Thomas Watson Giovanni but didn’t marry his father because ‘I didn’t want to get married, and I could afford not to get married’. 

She dedicated her 1971 book Spin a Soft Black Song to Thomas. In her subsequent children’s poems, Nikki revealed her dedication to family life. In a collection of articles and essays dubbed Sacred Cows and Other Edibles, Nikki described the joys and frustrations of living with her teenage son. 

The poet told HuffPost Live that she keeps falling in love and doesn’t mind not getting loved in return. She stated that she keeps falling for married men. 

“Then at my age, everybody is married, so I can fall in love with anybody I want to because who’s single? Nobody. So you can fall in love with a lovely married man – if it’s good enough for ‘Scandal,’ it’s good enough for me. I love it,” Nikki told NPR. She added that an upside of falling in love multiple times was writing many love poems. “That’s a lot of fun,” she stated. 

Nikki has been linked to her roommate of over 30 years, Virginia Fowler. In 1987, English professor Virginia Fowler invited Nikki to teach creative writing at Virginia Tech. Nikki held that role until 1st September 2022.

She told The New York Times that she refers to Fowler as her bench, not her partner. “Everybody needs a bench, and in order to get a bench, you have to be one,” Nikki said. “I could say love, but you get tired of hearing about love.”