SC Native Nikky Finney Named 2011 National Book Award Finalist in Poetry

Nikky Finney
Head Off & Split
TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press

ABOUT THE BOOK

The poems in Nikky Finney’s fourth collection, Head Off & Split, sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African-American life: from Civil Rights matriarch Rosa Parks, to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning, to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Her poet’s voice is defined by an intimacy, which holds a soft yet exacting-eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with S.C. Senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heart-breaking hilarity of an American President’s final state of the union address. Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nikky Finney is professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky and the author of three previous volumes of poetry, The World Is Round (winner of the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry), Rice (winner of a PEN America Open Book Award in 1995), and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). Recipient of the Kentucky Foundation for Women Artists Fellowship Award, Finney is also the author of Heartwood, a collection of stories, and edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South.

For more information, visit http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2011.html.