Nikki Giovanni—famous poet and winner of dozens of awards—died last month at age 81. We never met in person, so she’ll never know that one particularly interesting thing she did while eating lunch at a Kentucky Fried Chicken more than 25 years ago greatly touched my life.

By the time she was in her late fifties and eating that lunch at KFC, Nikki Giovanni was hugely famous, as poets go. In addition to her numerous literary awards, she was also a longtime professor of English literature at Virginia Tech, and by the time she reached old age, she had received 31 honorary doctorates. Despite having grown up in poverty in the 1940s and ’50s, she had risen to a high station in life due to her own tenacity and literary talents. 

I have it on good authority that she was also a really nice, down-to-earth person. When she came to our city in the late 1990s as part of the library’s literary speakers series, my husband, who worked in the library’s marketing department, had the privilege of accompanying her where she needed or wanted to go. And where she wanted to go, after she was done speaking and on her way back to the airport, was Kentucky Fried Chicken.

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