NIKKY FINNEY reflects on the past year, the necessity of poetry, the importance of historical context, and a reckoning in understanding the world we live in. Poet Saida Agostini will moderate this session. A reading, commentary, and audience Q & A. 

The Writer’s Room: Poet to Poet with Nikky Finney from 3:00 - 4:15 pm. Click here to register.

A special The Writer’s Room designed to engage and address Black poets, how to be a poet of this time, how to champion history and correction in a time of upheaval and uncertainty. 

NIKKY FINNEY was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her latest collection of poems is Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional 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.” 

Nikky won The Sewanee Review’s 2020 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and is the recipient of the 2020 Wallace Stevens Award, a $ 100,000-lifetime achievement honor presented by the Academy of American Poets. Academy judges praised Finney for her “fierce moral conviction” and as a bard “for the African diaspora.”

SAIDA AGOSTINI is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways that Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her first collection of poems, just let the dead in, was a finalist for the Center of African American Poetry & Poetics’ 2020 Book Prize, as well as the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her first chapbook, STUNT (Neon Hemlock, October 2020), explores the history of Nellie Jackson, a Black woman entrepreneur who operated a brothel for sixty years in Natchez, Mississippi. Saida’s poetry can be found in Barrelhouse Magazine, the Black Ladies Brunch Collective's anthology, Not Without Our Laughter, and other publications. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Saida has been awarded honors and support for her work by the Watering Hole and Blue Mountain Center, as well as a 2018 Rubys Grant funding travel to Guyana to support the completion of her first manuscript.

*After the program, which will be held as a Zoom Webinar, those attending who wish to engage further with the featured authors about craft should register for The Writer’s Room through Eventbrite. The Writer's Room is a new Festival highlight designed to engage festival attendees, who are also writers, in an informal conversation with the featured guest authors. Participants are encouraged to come prepared with questions. They will receive a link to attend an informal Zoom Meeting through Eventbrite where featured authors will join attendees virtually face to face. Featured guest artists are open to discussing different aspects of writing including questions about craft, research, writing process, challenges, and questions about publication. 

Zoom Webinar: Featured authors cannot see attendees (Cameras off: Only the featured author can be seen.) Zoom Meeting: Featured authors join attendees where everyone who attends can be seen. (Cameras on: Everyone is attendance can be seen unless you turn off your video.)

Website links:
https://www.citylitproject.org/event/the-mattering-of-words-with-nikky-finney/