National Book Award winner Nikky Finney to address Transylvania convocation on Sunday, Sept. 9, at 7 p.m.; free and open to the public
LEXINGTON, Ky.—Poet and professor Nikky Finney, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry, will deliver the convocation address for the beginning of the academic year at Transylvania University on Sunday, Sept. 9, at 7 p.m. in Haggin Auditorium. Her presentation is entitled “The Art of Being Taken With Yourself.” Finney is Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her 2011 collection of poems, Head Off & Split, was published by Northwestern University Press and won the National Book Award. The collection caused critics to hail Finney as “…one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today….” (Kwame Dawes, author of Hope’s Hospice) and as a writer who “…takes the reader to a wonderfully alive world where the musical possibilities of language overflow with surprise and innovation.” (Bruce Weigl, author of What Saves Us) Finney was raised in South Carolina as the daughter of a civil rights attorney and a teacher and came of age during the civil rights and black arts movements. Those facts of her upbringing continue to exert powerful influences on her writing and teaching. Many of her poems relate intimately to emblematic figures and events in African American life, from civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. The National Book Award nominating form said that Finney’s poems dramatize the struggle for justice and speak of “…family and politics, violence and compassion;