Nikki Giovanni, the award-winning US poet who emerged as one of the leading voices of the 1960s Black Arts movement, has died aged 81.

Giovanni died on Monday following her third cancer diagnosis, her friend, the author Renée Watson, told NPR in a statement.

“We will forever be grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us, to all her literary children across the writerly world,” said the poet Kwame Alexander.

Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee, but dubbed Nikki by her older sister, Giovanni studied at Fisk University in Nashville. There, she met several Black literary figures including Amiri Baraka and Dudley Randal before studying poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts.

She published her first two poetry collections in 1968 – Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement – starting a career that would span more than 30 books including Those Who Ride the Night Winds and Bicycles: Love Poems.

She became part of the burgeoning Black Arts movement which included figures such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Thelonious Monk and Audre Lorde. As a civil rights activist and politically engaged writer, Giovanni also attracted the attention of the FBI; she told the Pittsburgh Press that she used to invite the agents monitoring her into her home “for coffee because I knew they wanted to check out the place”.

Writing accessible poetry about Black liberation, as well as poetry on love, gender and the small pleasures of family life, Giovanni became a public figure. She appeared on the Black arts show Soul! in conversation with the likes of Baldwin and Muhammad Ali, edited many volumes of poetry and essays, championed hip-hop and wrote several children’s books including Rosa, an award-winning biography of Rosa Parks.

Giovanni taught English at Virginia Tech from 1987 until 2022. In 2007, one of her former poetry students murdered 32 people in the Virginia Tech shooting. Giovanni later said she had asked the university to remove him from her class in 2005, saying she felt he was menacing.

Asked about the shooting, Giovanni said: “Killing is a lack of creation. It’s a lack of imagination. It’s a lack of understanding who you are and your place in the world. Life is an interesting and … good idea.”

When she died, she was working on a final poetry collection, as well as a memoir titled A Street Called Mulvaney.

“I used to think I’m mellowing,” Giovanni told the Guardian in February. “You know, getting to be an old lady and I’m really cool. And then I realised, no, there’s still quite a bit of anger.”

Giovannie was diagnosed with lung cancer in the 1990s and underwent several surgeries. She is survived by her son Thomas, her granddaughter, and her spouse, Virginia Fowler, an English professor who became Giovanni’s biographer before they married.