Went last night to see Nikky Finney read at the Smith Poetry Center. I know! I should have posted before I went, in case you wanted to go too. But don’t worry, you can click here to see the rest of the schedule.

Finney’s work is quite nice; always engaging in its visuality, and completely absorbing at its best. Finney’s poems write her experiences of the world into images. As my friend said after the reading, I can’t wait to see her film. Because if she isn’t working on one, she should be!

I’ve put a few images of books by Nikky Finney at the end of this post, including the Cave Canem anthology; just click one of the images to see all of her titles. (Thankfully she is in print; you really should pick one up.) And following is her bio from the Smith College web site.

Speaking of events I should have mentioned beforehand, last Friday I went to see Peter Simatei (whom I am co-hosting with Katwiwa Mule from Smith) and the other fellows in the African Scholars Program. All of the scholars are doing pretty exciting stuff: Peter and Afis Ayinde Oladosu are both doing literary projects, with Peter looking at literature and the East Indian Diaspora in East Africa, and Afis working on nationalism in Sudanese literature. Imani Sanga, meanwhile, is an ethnomusicologist, working on popular church music in Tanzania, particularly Dar es Salaam.

“NIKKY FINNEY’s poems provide glimpses into the human adventures of birth, death, family, violence, sexuality, and relationship, exploring the soul of human community. They point out the constants we share and appeal for more compassion, reaching from the personal into the collective with equal measures of love and rage. Writes Walter Mosely, “She has flung me into an afterbirth of stars and made my stiff bones as loose as jelly.” Author of four books, most recently The World is Round, Finney is a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a group of Appalachian writers of African descent. Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky, she is this year’s Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.”