Announcing the 2025 Frost Medalist, Nikki Giovanni

The Poetry Society of America is pleased to announce that Nikki Giovanni is the 2025 recipient of the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. Named for Robert Frost, and first given in 1930, the Frost Medal is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in American poetry and is awarded annually at the discretion of the PSA's Board of Governors. Previous award winners include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, and most recently, Joy Harjo.

Nikki Giovanni was nominated for this year's Frost Medal in the fall of 2024; she passed away on December 9, 2024, just as the PSA Board of Governors began the process of selecting the recipient. The Board decided to award the Frost Medal to Giovanni posthumously.

The Frost Medal citation from the Poetry Society of America’s Board of Governors reads:

For half of a century, Nikki Giovanni loomed as an essential and powerful figure in American literature and culture, the author of three dozen books of poetry, essays, and children’s writing. With insight and stark intelligence, Giovanni’s written works articulate the highest hopes of our nation as a land where all are valued and all are free to be themselves and love who they wish to love. Emerging from the fervent 1960s Black Arts Movement, Giovanni’s politically direct poetry gave a sound to the frustration of African Americans, who also found in her imagery and lines reasons to treasure themselves. Her often witty and deeply reflective poems spoke to the deep channels of love and connection which are the source of our strength and survival. Throughout her career, Giovanni continued to speak to injustice in society and spoke out against white supremacy. Her poetry readings were punctuated with fierce political commentary and poignant humor. Giovanni was also an advocate for young people and the music that gave them a voice. She believed in literacy and empowering the youth to write about their world as they understood and experienced it. Everywhere her poetry and public appearances sought to dignify the lives of those without social advantages, who saw themselves as being on the margins of society. She reached countless readers by writing honestly about hope and love and reached an even broader audience through her recordings with musicians. The arc of her long career reveals her commitment to a vision that urged readers and audiences to value each other. She never lost her spirit and considered herself a prime candidate for space travel because she understood the poet’s role to be exploratory. Nikki Giovanni herself said, “I'm fortunate because I'm a poet, and poets are allowed to be hopeful. We are allowed to speak to the human condition, and we're allowed to remind people that the only worthwhile endeavor is another human being. We have the ability to contemplate the future and to look back into the past. Somebody has to think the thought that has not been thought.”

Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024), poet, activist, and educator, was raised in Tennessee and Ohio and graduated with honors from Fisk University in Nashville. A world-renowned poet and one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement, she was the author of over thirty books, from her first self-published volume, Black Feeling Black Talk (1968) to New York Times bestseller Bicycles: Love Poems (2009). She wrote several works of nonfiction and children’s literature and made multiple recordings, including The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection (2004), nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Spoken Word Album. Her children’s book Rosa, a picture-book retelling of the Rosa Parks story, was a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. Giovanni received numerous awards, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the inaugural Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Award, the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, the Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts, the Emily Couric Leadership Award, and a Literary Excellence Award. She was a seven-time recipient of the NAACP Image Award. She is the subject of the documentary film Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, which premiered at and won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. A devoted teacher, she spent thirty-five years as University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Nikki-Rosa

childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you’re Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have
your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath
from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in
and somehow when you talk about home
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father’s pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

A selection Nikki Giovanni’s books can be purchased through the Poetry Society of America’s store on Bookshop.org, an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores.

Nikki Giovanni, “Nikki-Rosa” from The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Copyright © 2003 by Nikki Giovanni. Used with the permission of HarperCollins.

Photo by Jan Cobb. All rights reserved.