As a child, Finney was often tasked with visiting the local fishmonger. Image courtesy of Nikky FinneyĮven as Finney was shaped by the protest era of the 1960s and 1970s - with her father bringing home “every incendiary dictionary, encyclopedia, and black history tome”- she was equally influenced by her mother’s family, particularly her maternal grandmother, Beulah Lenorah Butler Davenport, and their roots in South Carolina. That has been one of the backdrops of my entire life.” Nikky Finney with her father, Ernest A. As Nikky Finney recalled to NPR, “I've never been far away from the human-rights struggle black people have been involved with in the South. His clients often lost, and, as part of the “jail no bail” strategy, served brief sentences on chain gangs, before having their convictions overturned. He ultimately defended more than 6,000 individuals charged during protests and sit-ins, including the Friendship 9 of Rock Hill. There, Ernest Finney began a storied career as a human rights lawyer, politician, and judge.

Both he and his wife worked as teachers until 1960, when they moved to Sumter. Her father, a graduate of the segregated South Carolina State University School of Law, was not able to practice in Horry County. Nikky Finney was born August 26, 1957, in Conway, Horry County, to Ernest A. For Finney, this history permeates everything she writes. Almost 300 years later, a single historical marker along US Highway 17 serves as the only tangible reminder of this freedom uprising, a stark contrast with the hundreds of Confederate monuments that celebrate the men who fought to continue owning others.

The rebellion, which saw black men and women come together with cries of “Liberty!” on a southward march to freedom in Spanish Florida, was the largest slave insurgency in the colonies before the American Revolution. In South Carolina, enslaved people were explicitly barred from becoming literate by the Negro Act of 1740, enacted in response to the Stono Rebellion the previous year. Who lost hands and feet, were killed by laws written by men who believed they owned other men.' -Nikky Finney, National Book Award acceptance speech, 2011 In Nikky Finney’s acceptance speech for the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry, she began with history.

Image Courtesy of Forrest Clonts 'The ones who longed to read and write but were forbidden.

The world is round nikky finney