![]() ![]() Finney completed her graduate course work but abruptly left Atlanta University in 1981 without her MA degree, after being told she would not be able to substitute a creative poetic thesis for the traditional scholarly one. ![]() Finney received her BA from Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, in 1979 and was admitted into the historically significant African American studies program at Atlanta University. She discovered the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, Naomi Long Madgett, and Carolyn Rodgers while reading her family’s wealth of monthly black publications: JET, Black World, Ebony, and Crisis magazine. An introspective childhood was further nurtured by her devotion to the keeping of journal books, wandering across her grandparent’s land, and the assiduous learning of poetry by heart. The only daughter of an elementary school teacher and a civil rights attorney, Finney was raised in Sumter, South Carolina, where she attended Catholic and public schools.įinney’s love for words was anchored in her youth by the sound of the Atlantic Ocean and her maternal grandmother, Beulah Lenorah Butler Davenport, a woman deeply connected to the natural world and hard work. ![]() Nikky Finney was born by the sea in 1957 in Conway, South Carolina. ![]()
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