NIKKY
FINNEY
Nikky Finney is a poet, storyteller, and educator, from Conway, South Carolina. Her books include Lovechild’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts (2020), Head Off & Split (2011), winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry, The World is Round (2003), Heartwood (1997), Rice (1995), and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). She has edited Black Poets Lean South, a Cave Canem Anthology (2007) and been a faculty member at Cave Canem summer workshop for African American poets as well as a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets. She has won the PEN American Open Book Award in 1996, the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for the Arts in South Carolina in 2016, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from the University of the South, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Art of Change Fellowship from the Ford Foundation becoming part of the 2018 cohort as an ambassador for the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Art for Justice Project.
Finney has been a visiting professor at Berea and Smith Colleges, and has taught at the University of Kentucky for over 20 years. She is the John H. Bennett, Jr., Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters, with appointments in the Department of English Language and Literature and African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina.