Nikky Finney

Poet Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, the daughter of a lawyer and a teacher. Finney’s parents were both active in the Civil Rights movement, and her childhood was shaped by the turmoil and unrest of the South in the 1960s and 1970s. In an interview with the Oxford American, Finney noted,“I've never been far away from the human-rights struggle black people have been involved with in the South. That has been one of the backdrops of my entire life.” Finney’s engagement with political activism also influenced her trajectory as a poet. Carefully weaving the personal and political, Finney’s poetry is known for the graceful, heartfelt synthesis of the two. Lucille Clifton and Nikki Giovanni influenced Finney's work, and her poems explore subjects ranging from the human devastation of Hurricane Katrina to Rosa Parks to the career path of Condoleezza Rice.

Finney's recent poetry collections include Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020) and Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly, 2011), winner of the National Book Award. Of Head Off & Split, Finney told the Lexington Herald-Leader: “I know the sound of the '60s and '70s. There was a lot of standing with signs, there was a lot of shouting. I wanted to be a poet who didn't shout, who said things but said them with the most beautiful attention to language. … I've been really working on this for 30 years, exploring how those two paths intersect, the path where the beautifully said thing meets the really difficult-to-say thing, and that's where I think this book finds its light.”

Finney’s other books of poetry include On Wings Made of Gauze (Quill 1985), Rice (Sister Vision, 1995; TriQuarterly, 2013), Heartwood (University Press of Kentucky, 1997), and The World Is Round (TriQuarterly, 2013). She edited the collection The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press, 2007), an anthology of poets associated with Cave Canem, where Finney is on faculty. She is also a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a group of black Appalachian poets. She has received numerous awards for her work, including a PEN America Open Book Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry.

Finney received the Art of Change Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and was part of the 2018 cohort as an ambassador for the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Art for Justice Project. She is the John H. Bennett, Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina.