Works by Nikky Finney
Black Bone by Call Number: 821.914 B624 2017 - Circulating (3rd Floor)Publication Date: 2018"Brown Country" by Nikky FInney
Coal black voices : a documentary by Call Number: DVD 821.008 C652 2001 - DVD Collection (2nd Floor)Publication Date: 2001Coal Black voices is an intimate mosaic of images, poetry, and storytelling by the Affrilachian Poets as they glimpses of life in the American Black South and Appalachian region. The ensemble of African-American writers challenge simple notions of an all white Appalachian region and culture while drawing on the traditions such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the experiences of the African Diaspora. The poetry of the Afrilachian poets celebrates their African heritage and rural roots while encompassing themes of racism and Black identity. In this documentary they give voice to the pleasures of family, land, good food, artistic community, music and transformation
Head off and Split by Call Number: 821.914 F514h 2011 c. 2 - Circulating (3rd Floor)Publication Date: 2011The poems in Nikky Finney's breathtaking new 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. Finney's poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking 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.
Heartwood by Call Number: 374.012 F514h Copy 1 - Circulating (3rd Floor)Publication Date: 1997" Deep in the center of every tree, you'll find the heartwood. The characters in this new book by poet Nikky Finney are the heartwood of their small Kentucky communities. You'll meet Buck Jones and Mae Bennet, whose anger has twisted them up inside, Queenie Sims and Arizona Scott, who can see the good in people, and Trina Sims and Jenny Bryan, two young women who discover how much they are alike despite their different skin color.
On Wings Made of Gauze by Call Number: 821.914 F514o 1985 35027 - Circulating (3rd Floor)Publication Date: 1985
Rice by Call Number: 821.914 F514ri 2013 - Circulating (3rd Floor)Publication Date: 2013In Rice, her second volume of poetry, Nikky Finney explores the complexity of rice as central to the culture, economy, and mystique of the coastal South Carolina region where she was born and raised. The prized Carolina Gold rice paradoxically made South Carolina one of the most oppressive states for slaves and also created the remarkable Gullah culture on the coastal islands. The poems in Rice compose a profound and unflinching journey connecting family and the paradoxes of American history, from the tragic times when African slaves disembarked on the South Carolina coast to the triumphant day when Judge Ernest A. Finney Jr., Nikky’s father, was sworn in as South Carolina’s first African American chief justice. Images from the Finney family archive illustrate and punctuate this collection. Rice showcases Finney’s hungry intellect, her regional awareness and pride, and her sensitivity to how cultures are built and threatened.
The Ringing Ear by Call Number: 821.9208 R581 2007 - Circulating (3rd Floor)Publication Date: 2007The South: to render all that it means to an African American takes someone acutely tuned to their senses, someone with a patience, a passion even, for the region's history and contradictions. It takes a poet. In this new anthology, the first of its kind, more than one hundred contemporary black poets laugh at and cry about, pray for and curse, flee and return to - the South. Voices new to the scene appear in ""The Ringing Ear"" alongside some of the leading names in American literature today, including Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Harryette Mullen, Nikki Giovanni, Kevin Young, Cornelius Eady, and Al Young. The southern worlds opened up by these poets are echoed in how their poems are grouped, under headings like ""Music, Food, and Work: Heeding the Lamentation and Roar of Things Made by Hand,"" or ""Religion and Nature: The Lord Looks Out for Babies and Fools,"" or ""Love, Flesh, and Family: The Hush and Holler Portraits.
The World Is Round by Call Number: 821.914 F514w 2013 - Circulating (3rd Floor)Publication Date: 2013-07-31The World Is Round, Nikky Finney s third volume of poetry, collects the wisps of memory we carry with us throughout our earthly lives and weaves them into deft and nuanced poems that emphasize understanding the cycles of life. The settings offer a view into the kaleidoscope of human experience: the sweetness and shock of family life, the omnipresent wash of memory, and the ebullience of warm Southern air. The World Is Round carries with it an implicit challenge to the author as a poet, and to the reader as a fellow human to see the characters and details and events of our lives with clarity, fearlessness, and love. The result is poems that range the gamut of human reach and resilience, fury and frailty. The poet s vision of community requires understanding and tolerance from every breathing soul. Finney illuminates the cruelties of the sometimes gawking, narrow-minded world and makes a plea for compassion inspired by our common humanity."
Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry by Call Number: On OrderPublication Date: 2020-04-15Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts--copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of "docu-poetry." The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the "insurgent sensualist," hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: "I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . ." The tenderness of a father's handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl's fountainhead takes over every page. "One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing." Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.
Biography
NIKKY FINNEY was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). The John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997), edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split, was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.
source:
Spriggs, Bianca Lynne, and Jeremy Paden, editors. “Biographies.” Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2017, pp. 151–156.
