Nikky Finney

INFLUENCES

Many things have contributed to Nikky Finneys love for poetry.  She cites  "In Flanders Field" and Gwendolyn Brooks' "A Song In the Front Yard" as where she learned the aural power of poetry and the importance of attention to detail and the way they are presented.  Like all successful people she has mentors that she has used as an inspiration in her career of the arts. 

Nikky Finney's birth name is Lynn Carol Finney and as a child she was given the nickname "Nikky" as a reference to poet Nikki Giovanni. When Finney was a junior or senior in high school she sent Giovanni a folder full of her poems. Giovanni sat down with those poems and red-marked them and she wrote back, "Now there's a lot of red on these pages, but I want you to know there's something beautiful trying to happen, abundant among all this red." Since then she has been a friend and mentor for over 25 years.

Nikky Finney dedicated her latest book Head Off & Split, National Book Award for poetry winner, to Lucille Clifton. When quesitoned about this dedication she answered with: 

"When I was twenty-three years old, I found myself in Strand bookstore in New York City, and I found her amazing collection of poems and photographs. I had loved photography for a long time. I was writing about my family in my first book. I sat down, read her book three times, and it became a moment that I will never forget because it gave me permission to love photography, to talk about the stories of my family, and to also put those into forms of poetry. We met around 2005. She was in the audience and I relayed that experience to her. As a result, we spoke afterwards. I went to interview her that next year for an anthology called The Ringing Ear.She's at the center of everything I do. I always think about her. I always bring her name up and her work up. She's spinal to whatever I'm doing going forward in this life. I found great support for all the things I wanted to do with my own work in her work."