A RESOLUTION Adjourning the Senate in Honor of Nikky Finney Upon Receiving the 2011 National
UNOFFICIAL COPY AS OF 10/02/1812 REG. SESS.12 RS BR 811
A RESOLUTION adjourning the Senate in honor of Nikky Finney upon receiving the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry.
WHEREAS, Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina near the sea. Her father was a civil rights attorney, and her mother was a teacher in South Carolina. She grew up during the tumultuous civil rights movement in the 1960s in a small town. As a teenager, she longed to become a poet, but she did not know any poets. Nikky Finney was especially influenced by her partner, A. J. Verdell, her parents, her teachers and the poetry and friendship of Lucille Clifton and Nikki Giovanni. Likewise, the Amistad murals of Hale Woodruff at Talladega College influenced her life and her poetry; and
WHEREAS, Nikky Finney has been a poet and activist for the last thirty years. She was the co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, a group of African American poets which emphasized and included people of African descent from Appalachia. She has authored On Wings Made of Gauze in 1985, Rice, which won the PEN America Open Book Award in 1995, and The World is Round, published in 2003, which won the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry. Nikky Finney received the Kentucky Foundation for Women Artists Fellowship Award. Additionally, she wrote Heartwood, a collection of stories, and edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. Nikky Finney came to Kentucky in 1990 to be a one-year visiting professor at the University of Kentucky. Currently, she is the Provost's Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Kentucky where she teaches creative writing; and
WHEREAS, Nikky Finney won the prestigious 2011 National Book Award for Poetry for her collection of poems entitled Head Off & Split. In her acceptance speech, Nikky Finney summoned the souls of slaves from South Carolina that were prohibited from learning to read or write. Legally, the statutes were "devoted to quelling freedom, insurgency, imagination and all hope." Now, Nikki Finney exercises freedom as she writes powerful poetry about her experiences and those of the African American community. Incredibly drawn to personal history, American history and Southern history, Nikky Finney's poetry includes a sensitive and intense dialog of significant figures and events in her family life and in African American and Southern history. Nikky Finney draws on great African Americans from Rosa Parks, a civil rights activist who worked as a reporter for the NAACP and stood against racial discrimination, to Olympic Gold Medalist Wilma Rudolph, to U. S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and
WHEREAS, for the title of her book, Nikky Finney drew from her experience as a child who purchased fish for her mother from the fishmonger who said "head off and split." Nikky Finney urges everyone to respect the use of language and not take the telling of stories for granted. She asserts that we must give our children what they truly deserve: "the most eloquent, charged, radical (radical only means grabbing it by the root), tender, truthful words spilling from our arms";
NOW, THEREFORE,
Be it resolved by the Senate of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky:
Section 1. The Senate commends Nikky Finney for writing excellent poetry and for winning the prestigious 2011 National Book Award for Poetry.
Section 2. When the Senate adjourns this day, it does so in honor of Nikky Finney.
Section 3. The Clerk of the Senate is directed to transmit a copy of this Resolution to Senator Kathy Stein for delivery.
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