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Dear Geographers:
Please see email below from Katy Chiles, one of our Department’s friends in the English Department. Katy has arranged for noted poet Nikky Finney to visit UT next year.
The Department of Geography is serving as one of the many co-sponsors of Finney’s visit. Finney’s work might be of great interest to some of you interested in environmental justice, ecocriticism, southern studies, and Black studies. We are a whole year out
from Finney’s talk on campus, but I wanted to let you know of this exciting development.
Best wishes,
Derek Alderman
****
Dear Colleagues:
I thought you might be interested to know that Nikky Finney, National Book Award-winning poet, will visit UT on
Monday, April 4, 2016. Although this is a year away, I write you today because I thought you might want to consider teaching a bit of her poetry for your courses next year. Her two most famous books of poetry include Rice and Head Off and Split and
could be taught in courses on African-American studies, women’s studies and history, southern African-American culture, environmental justice, ecocriticism and natural disasters, contemporary black politics and social movements, and the politics of place. I
teach her work often myself, and I have found that the students are really challenged by it and really love it.
I append more about Finney and her work below, and I’m happy to chat with you anytime about this amazing poet,
her upcoming visit to UT, and how teaching her work might fit into your courses. Thank you for considering it, and I hope each of you has a great transition into the summer!
All best,
Katy Chiles
Nikky Finney is one of the best-known and beloved poets in the United States today, as her poetry addresses issues
of race, social justice, family, disaster, and national politics in deceivingly accessible, complex, and utterly beautiful verse. Her most recent book of poems, Head Off and Split, won the 2011 National Book Award for poetry and addresses contemporary
southern African-American life, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the legacy of Civil Rights activism in our contemporary culture. Her previous books include Rice, The World is Round, On Wings Made of Gauze, and Heartwood.
She is the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina.
Nikky Finney has attracted worldwide attention for her award-winning poems and her moving readings and presentations. She
has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, featured as a guest on Maya Angelou’s Black History Month Special and Def Poetry Jam, interviewed by NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and covered by periodicals from The Chronicle of Higher Education to Time. She
has performed readings and delivered lectures at Stanford, Fisk, Columbia, and Berkeley, just to name a few. Indeed, even a short video of her acceptance speech at the National Book Award ceremony quickly went viral. You can view what host and actor John
Lithgow called “the best acceptance speech for anything I have ever heard in my life” here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFSiKx-hzks).
Professor Finney will give a reading at the University of Tennessee on April 4, 2016, in Hodges Library Auditorium
at 7 pm.
_____________________
Katy L. Chiles
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of Tennessee
301 McClung Tower
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430
865-974-6945
Author of Transformable
Race (Oxford UP, 2014)