· The DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts is celebrating its 20th year with a new monthly format that features prominent authors year-round.
· Nikky Finney, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry, and Tyehimba Jess, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, will be the featured authors during February and in celebration of Black History Month.
· All DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts events are free and open to the public.
The DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts, which is celebrating its 20th Anniversary during the 2022-23 academic year, will host a Virtual Reading featuring award-winning poets Nikky Finney and Tyehimba Jess from 12-1 p.m. CT on Wed., Feb. 15, via Zoom in conjunction with a variety of events taking place at DMACC in February in celebration of Black History Month. Anyone interested in attending this free virtual event should register here online.
The year-round DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts spotlights a variety of local, regional and nationally known authors, and includes mix of both in-person and virtual formats. Events are held on a monthly basis and are open to the public.
“We’re so pleased to host a reading with Nikky Finney and Tyehimba Jess during this year’s DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts,” said Marc Dickinson, DMACC English Professor and Coordinator of the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts. “Nikky and Tyehimba are both brilliant storytellers, inspired artists and thinkers, and true teachers.”
About the authors: Nikky Finney and Tyehimba Jess
Nikky Finney has been a faculty member at the Cave Canem summer workshop for African American poets and is a founding member of The Affrilachian Poets, a particular place for poets of color in Appalachia. She has been a poet and professor for 23 years at the University of Kentucky, as well as a visiting professor at Berea and Smith Colleges.
Finney won the PEN American Open Book Award in 1996 and the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for the Arts in South Carolina in 2016. She edited “Black Poets Lean South,” a Cave Canem anthology (2007), and authored “On Wings Made of Gauze” (1985), “Rice” (1995), “Heartwood” (1997), “The World Is Round” (2003), and “Head Off & Split,” winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry. Her acceptance speech has become a thing of legend, described by the 2011 National Book Awards host John Lithgow as “the best acceptance speech ever – for anything” (watch it here).
In her home state of South Carolina, Finney involves herself in the day-to-day battles for truth and justice while also guiding both undergraduates and MFA students at the University of South Carolina, where she is the John H. Bennett, Jr., Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters, with appointments in both the Department of English Language and Literature and the African American Studies Program. Her work, in book form and video, and including her now legendary acceptance speech, is on display in the inaugural exhibition of the African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
Finney’s work includes the arenas of Black girl genius unrecognized, Black history misplaced and forgotten, and the stories of women who prefer to jump instead of ride the traditional tracks of polite and acceptable society. In her full body of poetry and storytelling, she explores the whispers and shouts of sexuality, the invisibility of poverty in a world continually smitten by the rich and the powerful, the graciousness of Black family perseverance, the truth of history, the grace and necessity of memory, as well as the titanic loss of habitat for all things precious and wild. Her new collection of poems, “Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry,” was released in 2020 from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.
Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, “Leadbelly” and “Olio,” the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. “Olio” was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. “Leadbelly” was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series, and the Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the Best Poetry Books of 2005.
Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. Jess presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He also received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018.
Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island. His fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as “Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry,” “Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century,” “Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art,” “Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam,” “Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex” and “Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.”
Register to attend
To attend this free virtual event, register here. Everyone is welcome.
For more information about the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts, click here or contact Marc Dickinson, DMACC English Professor and Coordinator of the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts, at (515) 964-6221 or madickinson@dmacc.edu.
Select writings by Nikky Finney:
- The Afterbirth, 1931
- The Aureole
- Dancing with Strom
- Author website: nikkyfinney.net
Select writings by Tyehimba Jess:
- What Marked Tom
- Mercy
- Another Man Done
- Ted Talk
- Author website: tyehimbajess.net
About DMACC
Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) is one of America’s top-rated two-year institutions of higher learning. DMACC is dedicated to changing lives by offering an accessible, affordable and outstanding educational experience to students from across Iowa and the nation. The College is proud to welcome students to a diverse and inclusive community. Situated in one of America’s most vibrant regions, DMACC offers 220 programs, certificates and transfer degrees, and annually serves nearly 60,000 students across the College’s six campuses and seven learning centers. DMACC’s talented graduates excel in the workforce and in life. For more information, please visit dmacc.edu.
(contributed press release, DMACC)
