Nikki Giovanni is a poet who first gained prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today, she is still well known to many! Not surprisingly, she has touched a whole new generation of young people with her tribute poems to Tupac Shakur, another genius poet. As it should be, her poems will remain forever timeless and she will always be special in our lives.

Some time ago, I saw Nikki at one of her poetry readings in New York City and took pictures with her. She was very famous at the time. Her poetry had been read and enjoyed by people from all walks of life. Her record "The Truth Is On Its Way" had shot up the charts to success. The recording with its poetry and gospel music brought the poetic genre to a wider audience. Nikki was also a regular on a popular, New York City television show. People admired her. Black women were naming their daughters "Nikki" and "Giovanni" in her honor. Every budding poet wanted to be just like her. I was certainly one.

Next, I saw her in one of the most tranquil, Southern places. It was a town called Blacksburg, Virginia. By that time, she was a professor at a college I knew as Virginia Polytechnic University. On the day after I gave a speech to the African-American students on that campus, a student took me over to Nikki's classroom and she introduced me to her class. It would have been great to ride with her to the airport as our scheduled flights happened to be on the same day. But her plane left much later than mine.

A few years ago, I sadly watched CNN and saw the awful unfolding of the shooting tragedy at a school simply identified as Virginia Tech. As the camera panned across the campus' buildings, I had a funny feeling in my stomach. There was something very familiar about those stone structures. Over and over, I went through those pictures in my mind and it suddenly hit me. I had been on that campus. As the camera zoomed in on one particular building, I found it to be eerily familiar. I had been in it. I had been in Nikki's classroom in that very place. And I wondered whether she had been teaching when the shootings occurred? Was she ok? Later, I found out that she was thankfully out of town.

I remember she said on the news that the shooter had been one of her former students. In fact, she was one of the first to recognize his troubling demeanor. I remember her "We are Virginia Tech" poem recited before the college's student body days after the tragedy. As I listened to her on that solemn day, I realized Nikki Giovanni was the light that so many of those students at Virginia Tech needed to help ease their heartache. As she had done with thousands of students at various campuses throughout the years, she touched them in a very real place. By the same token, she touches so many people with her poems because they remind us of our lives.