HBO Documentary Films has picked up the rights to an award-winning documentary about poet, children’s author, and activist Nikki Giovanni, Deadline reports.
The network will air Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, which won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The film is written by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson and produced by Rada Studio, and it features actor Taraji P. Henson reading some of Giovanni’s poems.
Giovanni, a central figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, made her literary debut in 1968 with the poetry collection Black Feeling, Black Talk. She is also widely known as an author of children’s literature, with books including Rosa, The Grasshopper’s Song, and A Library.
She made headlines in 2007 after giving a convocation speech at Virginia Tech the day after Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people at the university. Cho had been a student of Giovanni’s until she had him removed from her poetry class, saying the student had a “mean streak.”
In the documentary, Rada Studio says, “Present-day Giovanni reckons with the inevitable passing of time, while an evocative melding of vérité and archival images act as openings into her mindscape, transcending time and place.”
Brewster and Stephenson told Deadline that they are “thrilled and honored” that HBO picked up their documentary.
“We believe that through this collaboration, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project has found a home where it will shine and have a global reach,” they said.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
