Rosa by Nikki Giovanni
Mulitcultural Literature
Amazon.coms Significant Seven
Nikki Giovanni graciously agreed to answer the questions we like to ask
every author: the Amazon.com Significant Seven.
Q: What book has had the most significant impact on your life?
A: No single book. The poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston
Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks was an impact, however.

Q: You are stranded on a desert island with only one book, one CD, and
one DVD--what are they?
A: Sula by Toni Morrison, Great American Spirituals, and The Godfather.
Q: What is the worst lie youve ever told?
A: Youre the best.
Q: Describe the perfect writing environment.
A: A cup of coffee, my rocking chair, the sun just rising through my left
window.
Q: If you could write your own epitaph, what would it say?
A: I tried.
Q: Who is the one person living or dead that you would like to have
dinner with?
A: Lorraine Hansberry
Q: If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
A: I would fly.
Personal Review: Rosa by Nikki Giovanni
Sometimes I think the nicest thing about Nikki Giovanni is she lets a good
story unwind before you all by itself. And then I have to remember that's
the craft, it appears so effortless in her hands. This book that I just got in a

school book sale, for very little, is certainly a pearl without price, a deal
here for anyone wanting to gift a classroom, school, library, teacher, child.
This is the story of Rosa Parks on one day as it should be told, as it
unfolds with the language of that day, with the details and immediacy of
seeming so right, of a realness that might include macaroni and cheese
and hearing of Rosa's arrest at a Piggly Wiggly.
I love to ride buses. I rode them the first 28 years of my life exclusively. But
nothing matches the heat of one of them in the true southern summers,
and the need for them there. Oh that is another story to share of poverty
and hard work, lives of hard work and hours of labors. When I rode as a
young girl with my grandmother in Florida it was sweltering, noisy, lurching
and an experience hard to think of how to place into a book. Yet this one
seemed to sweep up that exhaust and fume along with the separation, the
sections for the folks, the inherent separations of the south and seat it onto
the bench just there, next to Rosa Parks as this seamstress going home. A
Rosa Parks that was unassumingly good, who met and faced the barbarity
of separate but unequal by refusing to be satisfied as less. No, on this day
she did not stand and defer to a clod of a driver and a bus full of
resentment and outright hostility that asked her to get up for a white
patron. Rosa Parks asked then to be treated the way others expected to
be, and she then we know so well, she was arrested. The simple act
became a call to grace.
I think if you want to teach this story, and everyone should teach this story
with children, this is the writer and this is the book to start the journey onto
a way of our meeting to face fate. Onto a bus with questions posed to the
audience of our humanity. Are we able to allow our shadow, our bigotry,
our lie to be cast away and give to another what we might want for our
own? Are we able to rise from this bus, this symbol of movement, shared
ride as travelers, this place of communion upon a road of justice, can we
meet here in Mrs. Parks and find a collective way of traveling together as
brother, over the horror of some approximation of as master and slave?
Can we within this moment carry it forward in times arrow into the
collective consciousness to rise and lift a people forward from here on our
seat?
This is what Giovanni encapsulates within her work and Collier illustrates
to take to our children, the questions we hold out for them though our times
to consider and collectively address.
The book is inspired, it is accurate, it is driven to you on a dream of
southern telling, so that you can, through the re-telling, shape the
possibility that this becomes the least we can do, to sit together in mutual
respect and consideration willing to allow someone as fine as Mrs. Parks a
nice seat after a long day of hard work as she thinks of the meatloaf she
will be making for her family and the mother that has been ill she is caring
for, who frames for us her humanity on a day all the world will be listening

and watching her face and she will stare directly with her will at the
national charter and what it must require of us in the doing.
And we hear Giovanni in the re-telling. Asking us again to ask these
questions that must be asked and answered by every person. Who are we
on this bus? By what will we be known?
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