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Giovanni's collection, Bicycles: Love Poems (2009), is a companion work to her 1997 Love Poems. They touch on the deaths of both her mother and her sister, as well as the massacre on the Virginia Tech campus. “Tragedy and trauma are the wheels” of the bicycle. The first poem “Blacksburg Under Siege: 21 August 2006” and the last poem “We Are Virginia Tech” reflect this. Giovanni chose the title of the collection as a metaphor for love itself, "because love requires trust and balance." In Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (2013), Giovanni describes falling off of a bike and her mother saying “Come here, Nikki and I will pick you up”. She has explained that it was comforting to hear her mother say this, and that, “it took me the longest to realize – no, she made me get up myself.” Chasing Utopia continues as a hybrid (poetry and prose) work about food as a metaphor and as a connection to the memory of her mother, sister, and grandmother. The theme of the work is love relationships.

On September 28, 2005 the Board of Trustees of the Kennedy Center and the Board of Directors of VSA arts – as the organization was known at the time – announced their formal Affiliation, effective October 3, 2005. The stated purpose of this action was to "enable both organizations to expand and strengthen their arts education programs to better serve children, families and all people with disabilities around the world." Other reasons cited were to allow for the sharing of resources and programming between the two organizations. The affiliation became a full merger in 2011.