Nikky Finney

Finney at the blackboard, drawing the path from idea to poem.

As a child, Nikky Finney spent summers and holidays on her grandparents’ farm in Newberry, South Carolina.

After Emancipation, Finney’s ancestors had bought as much land as they could afford, vowing that they would never have to work for another white man. “They bought the land that my grandfather and grandmother lived on all of their lives at an Emancipation Day auction,” she says. “Which was what my grandmother called it. Land meant freedom, land meant you always had a place to go, and you didn’t sell it, you did everything to defend it.”

That sensibility has taken root, and borne fruit, in Finney’s writing. “I have to write something, I have to grow something on the page, and I have to literally put my hands in the soil and grow something, to be all of who I am,” she says. “I can’t just intellectualize it. I need to know the cycle of life.”

Nikky Finney is the author of several books of poetry, including Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award in 2011.

Finney looking at a Sarah Hoskins photograph of a hog killing. Hoskins’ photo was taken in New Zion, Kentucky in 2002, and is part of a larger series, “The African American Hamlets of Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass Region.”

A table in Finney’s studio is strewn with photos: James Baldwin. Lucille Clifton. Her grandmother Beulah’s feet. June Jordan, Angela Davis, Barbara Christian, and Finney, together in California. Finney as a child on her Daddy’s lap, flashing a peace sign.