Nikky Finney: Love amid crisis

Sam Gill is senior vice president and chief program officer at John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In this role, he oversees all of Knight’s grantmaking programs — Community and National Initiatives, Journalism, and Arts. He also oversees Learning and Impact, Knight’s research and assessment program. Sam is the host of the podcast The Future of Democracy, a weekly conversation about the trends ideas and disruptions changing the face of democracy.

Nikky Finney is the author of five books of poetry, including Head Off & Split, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. She is the Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and currently serves as an ambassador for the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Art for Justice Project. Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (Triquarterly) is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. This collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, a new language of “docu-poetry.” Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day. Publishers Weekly’s starred review noted that “Finney’s skillful, sweeping epic ambitiously connects personal and public history.”