Pushkin.

What do poll dancing, AI Chappots and diet culture all have in common.

These subjects have a home on Embodied, the award-winning podcast I host from North Carolina

Public Radio W-U-N-C.

My name is Anita Rao, and you can consider me your personal guide to taking on the taboo.

Join me to explore important questions about our bodies and our society, where nothing is off limits.

So go ahead, listen to Embodied Every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.

This is talk easy. I'm San Francisco, so welcome to the show. The Today I'm joined by Professor and poet Nicky Giovanni.

Giovanni emerged from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s,

alongside writers like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Gwendeline Brooks, and Sonia Sanchez.

The movement, according to poet Larry Neal, was the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.

The mission statement being to create a separate cultural existence for Black people on their

own terms, where the beauty of blackness was front and center.

Giovanni became a leading voice from that era, and has since published over 20 poetry collections, including Black Feeling, Black Talk, Cotton

Candy on a rainy day, and Make Me Rain, which is now available on paperback through Harper Collins.

Her honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, three N-DoubleacP Image

Awards for Literature, and the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished

Contributions to Arts and Letters. She remains as the University Distinguished Professor

at Virginia Tech, where she has taught since 1987.

Naturally, Giovanni resides in Virginia, which is where she joins us from this week.

As I often say about people of a certain age that come on talk easy,

it's just impossible to capture

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