Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney Poems

Nikky Finney Biography

Nikky Finney (born Lynn Carol Finney on August 26, 1957 in Conway, South Carolina) is an American poet. She was the Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky for twenty years. In 2013, she accepted a position at the University of South Carolina as the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature. An alumna of Talladega College, and author of four books of poetry and a short story cycle, Finney is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation. Her honors include the 2011 National Book Award for Head Off & Split. One of three children, Finney is the only daughter of Ernest A. Finney, Jr., Civil Rights Attorney and retired Chief Justice of the state of South Carolina, and Frances Davenport Finney, elementary school teacher. Finney’s father began his career as a civil rights attorney, and in 1961, served as Head Legal Counsel for the Friendship 9, black junior college students arrested and charged when trying to desegregate McCrory’s lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina. In 1994, Ernest Finney, Jr., was appointed by the State Legislature as the first African-American Chief Justice of South Carolina since Reconstruction. Both of Finney’s brothers are attorneys in South Carolina: her older brother, Ernest “Chip” Finney, III, elected Solicitor of the Third Judicial Circuit, and her younger brother, Jerry Leo Finney, in private practice in Columbia, SC. Both Finney’s parents were raised on the family-owned land: Justice Finney on a farm in Virginia, and Frances Davenport Finney on a farm in Newberry, SC. Themes of the African-American relationship to the land surface throughout Finney’s work. Educated first in Catholic grade school, and then in South Carolina public schools during the riotous struggle over integration, Finney was anchored in her youth by her maternal grandmother Beulah Lenorah Butler Davenport and by the inimitable constancy of the nearby South Carolina sea. A bookworm in childhood, she composed poetry and acquired the nickname "Nikky", likely in reference to poet Nikki Giovanni, who would later become a friend and mentor. Graduated from Sumter High School in 1975, Finney matriculated at Talladega College, an HBCU in Alabama, where she was mentored by Dr. Gloria Wade Gayles, poet and essayist. After studying with Dr. Howard Zehr and graduating from Talladega College in 1979, Finney began her artistic career as a photographer. Finney committed to documenting the trajectory of African-American contributions to American creativity and culture. In Alabama, Finney continued to advance as an autodidactic poet and creative artist. Finney matriculated at Atlanta University, working in the African-American Studies department, under African-American historians Dr. Richard Long and Dr. David Dorsey. While in Atlanta, Finney joined the Pamoja Writing Collective, the community writing workshop led by Toni Cade Bambara. Finney also immersed herself in study of the poetry and visual arts of the Black Arts Movement. Ultimately, limited potential for creative work in academic programs caused Finney to abandon the constraints of graduate study and return to Talladega to work as a photographer. Hired as photographer and reporter by Byllye Y. Avery, for the newly organized, Atlanta-based National Black Women's Health Project, Finney traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, for the End of the Decade of Women Conference in 1985, and covered the historic UN conference for the National Black Women’s Health Project.)

The Best Poem Of Nikky Finney

The Girlfriend's Train

"You write like a Black woman who's never been hit before."

I read poetry in Philly
for the first time ever.
She started walking up,
all the way, from in back
of the room.

From against the wall
she came,
big coat, boots,
eyes soft as candles
in two storms blowing.

Something she could not see
from way back there but
could clearly hear in my voice,
something she needed to know
before pouring herself back out
into the icy city night.

She came close to get a good look,
to ask me something she found
in a strange way missing
from my Black woman poetry.

Sidestepping the crowd
ignoring the book signing line,
she stood there waiting
for everyone to go, waiting
like some kind of Representative.

And when it was just the two of us
She stepped into the shoes of her words:
Hey,

You write real soft.
Spell it out kind.
No bullet holes,
No open wounds,
In your words.
How you do that?
Write like you never been hit before?
But I could hardly speak,
all my breath held ransom
by her question.

I looked at her and knew:
There was a train on pause somewhere,
maybe just outside the back door
where she had stood, listening.

A train with boxcars
that she was escorting somewhere,
when she heard about the reading.

A train with boxcars
carrying broken women's bodies,
their carved up legs with bullet riddled
stomachs momentarily on pause
from moving cross country.

Women's bodies;
brown, black and blue,
laying right where coal, cars,
and cattle usually do.

She needed my answer
for herself and for them too.
Hey,

We were just wondering
how you made it through
and we didn't?

I shook my head.
I had never thought about
having never been hit
and what it might have
made me sound like.

You know how many times I been stabbed?

She raised her blouse
all the way above her breasts,
the cuts on her resembling
some kind of grotesque wallpaper.

How many women are there like you?
Then I knew for sure.

She had been sent in from the Philly cold,
by the others on the train,
to listen, stand up close,
to make me out as best she could.

She put my hand overtop hers
asked could we stand up
straight back to straight back,
measure out our differences
right then and there.

She gathered it all up,
wrote down the things she could,
remembering the rest to the trainload
of us waiting out back for answers.
Full to the brim with every age
of woman, every neighborhood
of woman, whose name
had already been forgotten.

The train blew his whistle,
she started to hurry.

I moved towards her
and we stood back to back,
her hand grazing the top
of our heads,
my hand measuring out
our same widths,
each of us recognizing
the brown woman latitudes,
the Black woman longitudes
in the other.

I turned around
held up my shirt
and brought my smooth belly
into her scarred one;
our navels pressing,
marking out some kind of new
Equatorial line.

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