A woman who can hula-hoop in her own mouth

Nikky Finney with gray and black dreadlocks wearing glasses, a maroon shirt with partially visible white text that reads POET, and layered necklaces.
Nikky Finney with gray and black dreadlocks wearing glasses, a maroon shirt with partially visible white text that reads POET, and layered necklaces.

The renowned American poet Nikky Finney was born by the sea in Conway, South Carolina in 1957. She grew up in Sumter, S.C., a deeply sensitive child stamped early by the undeniable power and cinema of words. Her formulative years were strongly influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movement of the mid-twentieth century. At Talladega College in Alabama, she studied for her B.A. in English Literature at a corner table in Savery Library tucked beneath Hale Woodruff’s immense and historically monumental Amistad murals. At that library table she followed her quiet but willful imagination and became a daughter of history absorbing the beauty, furious fight, and righteous dignity of Africans whose freedom had been stolen, who only wanted to turn the ship around and return home.

Finney is presently a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and an inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a faculty member at Cave Canem, summer workshop for African American poets; a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a place for poets of color in Appalachia; a visiting professor at Berea and Smith Colleges; and professor for twenty-three years at the University of Kentucky. At the University of South Carolina, she presently holds the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Studies and is also a Carolina Distinguished Professor. She holds Honorary Doctorate degrees from the University of Kentucky, Transylvania University, Leslie University, Claflin University, and Wofford College.

Nikky Finney’s work has attracted awards from across the country, including the PEN American Open Book Award in 1999 and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry in 2004; the GCLS Literary Award in 2012; the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for the Arts in South Carolina in 2016, and Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry was a Finalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has received awards from the Kentucky Arts Council and Kentucky Foundation for Women; the Aiken-Taylor Award from the Sewanee Review and the University of the South; the Wallace Stevens Award, given annually by the Academy of American Poets to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, and most famously, the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011 for her collection Head Off & Split. Her acceptance speech for this award has become a thing of legend, described by the 2011 NBA host, John Lithgow, as the “best acceptance speech ever – for anything.” Her work, in book form and video, is on display in the ongoing inaugural exhibition of the Smithsonian African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Finney’s work includes the arenas of Black girl genius as well as the stories of human beings who prefer to jump instead of riding the tracks of polite and acceptable society. She explores the whispers and shouts of sensuality, the grace of relentlessness, mother memory, and the titanic loss of habitat that Mother Earth finds herself in because of rapacious greed.

Poet and professor Nikky Finney has spent her career dutifully illuminating the cultural and political heritage of the fierce beauty of Black people in a world that often finds that beauty hard to see. Her legacy of precise and poignant expression, indomitable truth and devotion to social justice continues to enrich a world that needs voices who refuse to look away, go silent, or be disappeared.

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