Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry for Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011), Nikky Finney was born in Conway, South Carolina, and studied at Talladega College. She holds the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. Her earlier collections include Rice (Sister Vision Press, 1995) and The World Is Round (InnerLight Publishing, 2003). A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, she received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2020.
