Poets & Writers Theater

In this PBS NewsHour video, National Book Award-winning poet and professor Nikky Finney discusses the work of social justice activism and preservation in her community of Columbia, South Carolina, which includes opening a cultural arts center honoring her father’s legacy as the first Black chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court since the Reconstruction era.

“We begin with history. The slave codes of South Carolina, 1739,” begins Nikky Finney’s 2011 National Book Award acceptance speech for Head Off & Split (Northwestern University Press, 2011), where she traces the history of literacy in her own life and in the lives of African Americans. Finney is the recipient of the 2020 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, conferred annually to honor outstanding artistic achievement over a poet’s career.

“Mama was an elevator girl at Montgomery Ward’s in Trenton, New Jersey, summer of 1952...” In this video with poet Alondra Uribe, Nikky Finney reads “Hotbed #224” from her collection Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (TriQuarterly Books, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Last night Nikky Finney, who appeared on the cover of the March/April 2011 issue, won the National Book Award in poetry for her latest collection, Head Off & Split, published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Here she reads her poem "My Time Up With You."

Poet Nikky Finney, who is profiled in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads "Penguin, Mullet, Bread" from her collection Head Off & Split, published this month by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.