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Spotlight image: Nikki Giovanni, from the author’s website
Nikki Giovanni
“The renowned poet Nikki Giovanni has died. Giovanni died on Monday, Dec. 9, following her third cancer diagnosis, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson. She was 81,” reported NPR.
Giovanni “retired from Virginia Tech University in 2022 after 35 years as a professor in the Department of English,” Virginia Tech stated on their website. One of her students there was Kwame Alexander, who took her advanced poetry class as a sophomore, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Alexander argued about everything and pushed back on Giovanni’s guidance.
“I thought I knew more than she did about poetry. Yet she kept letting me take her classes, kept teaching me, saw what was possible for me, and shaped me into who I am today,” Alexander said, according to the Virginia Tech article.
Giovanni published 13 books for children, beginning with Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children, illustrated by Charles Bible (Hill and Wang, 1971/Square Fish, 1987).
She shared one of her most famous poems, “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why” for a sold-out audience at the Philharmonic Theater in 1973, according to the New York Times. That poem was the title piece for her 1973 book, Ego-Tripping, illustrated by George Ford (Lawrence Hill, 1973/Chicago Review Press, 1993), which included a foreword by Virginia Hamilton.
Giovanni’s most recent children’s book, I Am Loved, was illustrated by Ashley Bryan (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2018). He also illustrated Giovanni’s book, The Sun is So Quiet (Henry Holt, 1996).
Among her other children’s books are Rosa, illustrated by Bryan Collier (Henry Holt, 2005) which won a Caldecott Honor Award and the Coretta Scott King Medal for Illustration, and Lincoln and Douglass: An American Friendship, illustrated by Bryan Collier (Henry Holt, 2008/Square Fish, 2013).
In the biography on her website, Giovanni wrote she frequently stayed home from school and read her mother’s books: Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar John Hershey, and also listened to music.
“The radio in my day, Black and white, played everything. Gospel Spirituals, even some opera when Leontyne Price came along. You could listen to R&B late at night or you could go to the other station and listen to popular music.”
The books and music fueled Giovanni’s dreams. “My dream was not to publish or to even be a writer: my dream was to discover something no one else had thought of. I guess that’s why I’m a poet. We put things together in ways no one else does.”
Giovanni took part in an early entry college program offered by Fisk University in Nashville and enrolled before she finished high school. Though she was expelled at one point, she was readmitted and became actively involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and edited the campus literary magazine, wrote the Black Wall Street Times.
After graduating in 1967, she was accepted for graduate school and attended Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts program.
“No one was much interested in a Black girl writing what was called ‘militant’ poetry. I thought of it as good poetry, but we all have our own ideas. Since no one wanted to publish me, I formed a company and published myself,” Giovanni wrote in her online biography. Two years later, her book, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment was published by William Morrow in 1970.
Giovanni went on to be honored with many awards, including a National Book Award nomination, the Langston Hughes Award, seven NAACP Image Awards, was named a Living Legend by Oprah Winfrey, Woman of the Year by Ebony, Ladies Home Journal and Mademoiselle Magazines, American Book Award, Carl Sandburg Literary Award, Moonbeam Children’s Book Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Award, Langston Hughes Award, ALC Lifetime Achievement Award, Art Sanctuary’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and many arts residencies and other honors.
In 2004, a bat species, Micronycteris giovanniae, was named in her honor by Texas Tech biologist Robert Baker, according to A Way With Words podcast. The bat is native to Ecuador.
Bruce Degen
“Author and illustrator Bruce Degen, best known for his detailed, humorous artwork depicting the fun and informative field trips of Ms. Frizzle’s class in the Magic School Bus picture book series, died on Nov. 7 of pancreatic cancer at his home in Newtown, Conn. He was 79,” reported Publishers Weekly.
In an interview for Reading Rockets, Degen said he loved art from an early age. “In the sixth grade… I was painting in the back of the room all the time…. I always knew artwork would be something I would be doing.”
Degen went on to earn a bachelor’s in art from Cooper Union and a master’s in fine art from Pratt Institute, but it took him a while to realize that illustration was his calling. “…If you a book, it goes out to the world. It goes out in multiple copies; it’s printed. It’s in libraries, in homes. Somebody can have it here there and everywhere.” He said he frequently met families at bookstores who said they read his books nightly. “There’s nothing like the fact that you’ve actually become part of somebody’s family life.”
To land his first book contract, Degen “compiled a portfolio and met every publisher he could find in New York City. His determination paid off when Harper and Row published his Aunt Possum and the Pumpkin Man in 1977,” stated an In Memoriam post on the Cooper Union site.
Degen also created Jamberry (HarperCollins, 1983), Daddy is a Doodlebug (HarperCollins, 2000) and illustrated the Jesse Bear series by Nancy White Carlstrom (Aladdin, 1986 – 2012), along with many other picture books and early readers.
His book, I Gotta Draw (HarperCollins, 2012) was somewhat autobiographical. “It’s a young dog who’s an artist named Charlie Muttnik. He happens to live in Brooklyn, where I happened to live. He likes to draw, and he has a teacher named Miss Rich who I had,” Degen told the Newtown Bee in 2022.
In the same article, Degen also described the backstory of his collaboration with the late Joanna Cole for the Magic School Bus. Scholastic Editor Craig Walker was looking for a way to combine serious science information with humor to get kids reading. Though Degen was skeptical at first, he agreed to meet with Cole and the two brainstormed ideas and sketches. The team hit it off and became good friends, developing a system of Cole sending Degen the sources she used to write the text, he found additional materials and the manuscripts would be reviewed by experts. Each Magic School Bus book took about a year to complete.
Their first, The Magic School Bus Goes to Waterworks was published in 1986. Cole chose the topic of reservoirs, “knowing if they could work with a topic so underrated then they could succeed at the flashier topics of dinosaurs and space.”
After the series became an animated PBS show in 1994, the series popularity exploded and Degen and Cole agreed to let a separate team of people create spin-off books. According to Publishers Weekly, more than 95 million copies of the Magic School Bus books are in print worldwide.
Cynsations Notes
Gayleen Rabakukk holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an undergraduate degree in Journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma. She has published numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and two regional interest books for adults. She is represented by Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management.
She serves as board member for Lago Vista’s Friends of the Library and also leads a book club for young readers at the library. She’s active in Austin SCBWI and has taught creative writing workshops for the Austin Public Library Foundation. She loves inspiring curiosity in young readers through stories of hope and adventure. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.