After one year, a year of personal grief for Giovanni, she still maintains her optimistic, hope-filled, yet deeply opinionated and passionate personality.
Sitting in her office adorned with awards and an enormous poster of Tupac, Giovanni expressed her views on the shootings, gun control and her future in poetry.
After taking a semester off of teaching in the fall, which was planned prior to April 16, Giovanni said that she was given the time to reflect on the events of last spring. Even so, she believes that the Tech campus has remained unchanged.
"I don't think that the campus changed because people graduated and new people came in," she said. "I think the world has to take a page from our book because we have stayed in front of the tragedy. We didn't try to pretend it didn't happen and we didn't try to pretend that we didn't get hurt because we were and we are."
She also stated that even though the university underwent a terrible time, the campus community is still intact.
"We have our Drillfield and it's up and that's good," she said.
When asked about gun control and concealed weapons on campus, Giovanni passionately described her views on the subject, comparing it to video games and our current cinema. In particular, she stated that the recent film, "No Country for Old Men," which contained copious amounts of arbitrary murder while dealing with themes of morality and ethics, could inspire real killing as well.
She also compared the Tech shootings and February's Northern Illinois University shootings to popular video games where players save themselves by shooting down zombies and other foes.
"It's just like a video game," she said. "How scary is that?"
While she has nothing planned for today's events, Giovanni's zeal for poetry also hasn't changed. The past year has been difficult for Giovanni with the deaths of her mother and sister, both from cancer; since her muse, her mother, is now gone, she has had to reconfigure.
As a result, she is coming out with a new collection of poetry that has a style different for her usual self. The new collection will be composed of 65 love poems -- 65 poems for being 65 years old.
Giovanni said that since she had never experimented with a collection of this style of poetry, this will become a new form of expression for herself.
This year Giovanni became the first poet to win the Carl Sandburg Award and also received the 2007 Power Summit Legacy Award.
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