"An Evening with Nikki Giovanni" was not your average evening.
"I thought it was just going to be a poetry reading," said Social Work graduate student Kerry Dunn of the esteemed poet's reading. "But it was so much more."
Though she did read poems, Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni also shared her views on everything from sororities to NASA's Mars probe to Eminem with an audience of 300 who overflowed the chairs and lined the balcony in Houston Hall's Hall of Flags.
Giovanni is one of Penn's own. After receiving her B.A. from Fisk University, she entered Penn's Graduate School of Social Work. Eventually, however, she chose poetry over social work.
Still, she keeps her loyalties. Beginning with a discussion of social involvement, she called social workers "the first in line."
"If I could remake the world, I would take social workers back to knock on doors," she said.
At times, both Giovanni's words and the audience's loud cheers gave the feeling of a rally rather than of a poetry reading.
"We don't fight because it's convenient, we fight because it's right," Giovanni said to thundering applause.
"How can people think they need three or four million dollars to be happy? A free people have to tax themselves," Giovanni continued. "There's something more to being alive than just feeding our stupid faces."
Abruptly transitioning to the Mars probe, Giovanni made an analogy between the trip to Mars and the plight of blacks during the slavery era traversing the Middle Passage.
"Black Americans were the only people on earth taken somewhere they had no idea where they were going," she said. "NASA needs to call black America."
She then spoke of being in a place totally unknown and yet maintaining one's humanity.
Giovanni read a poem, "Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We're Going to Mars)," that talked of the moment when the Africans not only could not see their homeland anymore, but did not even know which way was back.
She said they made a decision -- whatever was at the end of the journey, "whatever it is, we will be human and humane."
Giovanni's next topic was Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement. Having known King personally, she spoke of details such as his prowess in pool. She reflected on how if he was alive today, she believes he would have braids and a tattoo.
She then pulled back her sleeve to reveal her own tattoo -- "Thug Life."
About Rosa Parks, Giovanni also had nothing but praise.
"She just keeps making things change," she said.
And although Giovanni has been named Woman of the Year by Ebony, Mademoiselle and Ladies' Home Journal, she says "the award I am most pleased about... is the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award."
"Very down to earth," said Bryn Mawr College junior Mignon Verdell of Giovanni's talk. "Deep and moving and lighthearted and funny... it had all the elements."
