All the while, as Giovanni’s reputation as a poet and activist grew, so did her work shaping students’ lives in more ways than one.
Take Kwame Alexander, now a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Newbery Medal, which is awarded to America’s best children’s authors. As a sophomore at Virginia Tech, he took his first advanced poetry class with Giovanni. But he couldn’t understand why she spent most of the class talking to students about life and current events. They were not taught how to write, he said.
Eventually he figured it out. Giovanni told him, “Kwame, I can teach you how to write, but I can’t teach you how to be attractive,” he recalled.
“Looking back, I learned everything,” he said. “That’s where I got the tools to write.”
Will Fuhrer, a former hockey and NFL quarterback who majored in English, said Giovanni taught him how to find his voice.
“Our obligation to ourselves was to develop our own voice and learn how to tell our story so that we can do something other than sports,” Fuhrer explained, a point Giovanni emphasized during her class. Athletes were flocking at the time.
Her advice was especially helpful in his current job as chief operating officer of Q2 Banking in Austin, Texas. The company builds banking applications.
As a student, Fuhrer remembers sitting in Giovanni’s office in Major Williams Hall listening to her talk about Aretha Franklin, Toni Morrison, Morgan Freeman and many other famous US novelists, artists, actors and leaders. She was close friends with many of them.
In fact, Giovanni organized an event to honor Morrison’s legacy at Virginia Tech in 2012, and literary legends Maya Angelou and Rita Dove were among the attendees.
“She was a new and different voice on campus,” said Fuhrer, who visited Giovanni recently to interview her for the company’s podcast celebrating Black History Month. “She brought different people, different actors, different influencers to campus so that people at Blacksburg and Virginia Tech could have different perspectives.”
