Distinguished Writers Series: Nikky Finney and Tom Sleigh Tuesday, April 10, 2012, 4:30PM Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff's Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997) edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney's fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry. Tom Sleigh's books include After One, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Prize; Waking, a finalist for the Lamont Poetry Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Chain, finalist for Lenore Marshall Prize; The Dreamhouse, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; Far Side of the Earth, an Honor Book Award from the Massachusetts Society for the Book; Bula Matari/Smasher of Rocks; a translation of Euripides' Herakles; a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost; and Space Walk, winner of the $100,000 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award. He has also received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the John Updike Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace Fund, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and elsewhere, as well as The Best American Poetry and The Best American Travel Writing anthologies His new book, Army Cats, was published this spring from Graywolf Press. This fall he was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.