Nikky Finney, PhD

Dr. Nikky Finney is the John H. Bennet, Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters - Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina.  She is currently a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Professor Finney has spent her career illuminating the Southern cultural and political heritage of Black people in ways that resonate throughout the country and world. Her ongoing legacy of poignant expression, indomitable truth, and devotion to social justice has enriched the country and world.

She has recently been appointed the Executive Director of the newly launched Ernest A. Finney, Jr. Cultural Arts Center in Columbia, a 21st-century arts and cultural center named for her father, an exciting endeavor deeply planted in the twin soils of creativity and Black cultural expression.

Professor Finney has written six books and hundreds of poems and essays that explore and confront the experiences that have shaped life in the South for herself and countless other African Americans. Her most recent book, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020) is an enduring love song to her father and 400 years of African-American fight and ingenuity.

Her work has gained her numerous awards from organizations 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 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 for her 2011 book Head Off & Split.