Mocha Girls Read - Philadelphia

Craft a strategic plan for the week or month ahead.
Conquer your budget and master your finances.
Unleash your inner wordsmith with journaling prompts. ✍️
Curl up with a good book and get some quality reading time in.
Connect with fellow Mocha Girls and share your goals, tips, or just unwind.
Remember: Failing to plan IS planning to fail.
So, ditch the Sunday scaries and join us! ✨
Hosted by: Tenille Griffin
When: Every Saturday ️
Join via Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/kyz-ekae-hmt
Let's make every week a success together!

REMEMBER:
Support a Black-owned Bookstore called RESIST BOOKSELLERS and get 15% off when you use the code MGR22.

About the Book:
One of America’s most celebrated poets looks inward in this powerful collection, a rumination on her life and the people who have shaped her.

As energetic and relevant as ever, Nikki now offers us an intimate, affecting, and illuminating look at her personal history and the mysteries of her own heart. In A Good Cry, she takes us into her confidence, describing the joy and peril of aging and recalling the violence that permeated her parents’ marriage and her early life. She pays homage to the people who have given her life meaning and joy: her grandparents, who took her in and saved her life; the poets and thinkers who have influenced her; and the students who have surrounded her. Nikki also celebrates her good friend, Maya Angelou, and the many years of friendship, poetry, and kitchen-table laughter they shared before Angelou’s death in 2014.

About the Author:
Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni Jr. (June 7, 1943 – December 9, 2024) was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world’s best-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children’s literature. She won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for a 2004 Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey‘s 25 “Living Legends“. Giovanni was a member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.

Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the “Poet of the Black Revolution”. During the 1970s, she began writing children’s literature and co-founded a publishing company, NikTom Ltd, to provide an outlet for other African-American women writers. Over subsequent decades, her works discussed social issues, human relationships, and hip hop. Poems such as “Knoxville, Tennessee” and “Nikki-Rosa” have been frequently re-published in anthologies and other collections.

Giovanni received numerous awards and held 27 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities. She was also given the key to more than two dozen cities. Giovanni was honored with the NAACP Image Award seven times. She had a South American bat species, Micronycteris giovanniae, named after her in 2007.

Giovanni was proud of her Appalachian roots and worked to change the way the world views Appalachians and Affrilachians.

Giovanni taught at Queens College, Rutgers, and Ohio State, and was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech until she retired on September 11, 2022. After the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, she delivered a well-received chant-poem at a memorial for the shooting victims.
(Read more at Wikipedia)