The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She became a professor at Virginia Tech, where she called forth beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there — a precursor to violence that has become all too familiar in American life in the intervening years. And she was an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to all — at home in her body and in the world, even while she saw and exulted in the beyond of this tumultuous age of her lifetime.

Nikki Giovanni was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Some of her best known collections from which the readings in this show were taken include Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Her final publications include Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose and The Library.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. As much as anyone, Joan Baez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and songs and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota singer-songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan, whose career she pivotally helped launch, is also reentering the public imagination with a big new movie. And her classic heartbreak hit about him, “Diamonds and Rust,” is topping global charts anew.

But Joan Baez at 83 is so much more intriguing than her projection as a legend. She grew up the daughter of a Mexican physicist father and a Scottish mother in a seemingly idyllic family. But even at the height of her fame, she was struggling mightily with mysterious interior demons. She and her beloved sisters finally reckoned in midlife with a truth of abuse they had buried, even in memory, at great cost. She has reckoned with fracture inside herself and been on an odyssey of wholeness. She is frank and funny, irreverent and wise. Among other gifts, she offers a refreshing way in to what it means to sing and live the reality of “overcoming,” personal and civilizational.

Krista spoke with Joan on stage at the 2024 Chicago Humanities Festival.

Joan Baez published her first (wonderful) book of poetry at the age of 83: When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance. She was one of the leading artists of the 1960s folk revival, and brought her voice to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of that decade. She performed for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums. She has won scores of awards and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. In addition to her poetry, she has published a book of drawings, Am I Pretty When I Fly?: An Album of Upside Down Drawings, and painted a series of portraits called Mischief Makers. You can find the links for her books here.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of "pleasure activism" and "emergent strategy," is surely one of these.

We're listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred in this season of On Being: on looking the harsh complexity of this world full in the face while dancing with joy as life force and fuel, and on keeping clear eyes on the reasons for ecological despair while giving oneself over to a loving apprenticeship with the natural world as teacher and guide. A love of visionary science fiction also finds a robust place in her work and this conversation. She altogether shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking — the cultivation of old and new ways of seeing, towards a transformative wholeness of living.

adrienne maree brown’s influential books include Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, and Pleasure Activism. More recently, she has published Maroons, a work of speculative fiction, and she co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She also co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World. And, a special heads up: in late summer 2024, adrienne maree brown will publish a phenomenal new book — Loving Corrections.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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