Heartwood CoverHeartwood

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION
University Press of Kentucky
Paperback, 85 pages
5 x 8" / September 2021
Order here / Download a high resolution book cover

A message from Nikky about the 25th Anniversary release of Heartwood:

Kentucky, the state, is not a place you can easily categorize. You may think, if you watch a lot of TV, that you can sum up Kentucky in a few words, but you really can’t. Not really. People in Kentucky, from all walks of life, from varying cultures and financial standing, from the person who walks the horse at the Kentucky Derby, to the person who owns the horse, love a story and love a book in a way I had never seen, before I moved there in the early 1990’s. 

Twenty-Five years ago, in Kentucky, I was asked to consider writing a story. A story for everyone who loved a story but most especially for “new readers” and for the New Readers Series that the Kentucky Humanities Council had been sponsoring for several years. The new readers I was asked to write a story for were members of my community who were often hourly frontline workers, pushing the clock hard and shuffling between two and three jobs to make ends meet. These new readers were often left behind by publishing companies who treated them as if they weren’t book consumers and therefore didn’t need to be involved in the process. The Kentucky Humanities Council knew better.  I knew better. I was honored to try and compose something that might stir their interest in reading and might also fill their hearts with some new Nikky Finney characters.

For the last 25 years, as I traveled and read poetry around the country, I was always surprised and delighted to find a stranger standing in line with Heartwood, the book for new readers, tucked up tight under their arm. So many times as I signed their sweetly battered copy, I was also gifted a very personal story about a grandmother who picked it up and didn’t put it down until she finished it or an uncle “who didn’t like the modern world so much” but took a shine to something about this story.

This is the place in this story, about that story, where I’m supposed to tell you that the new 25th anniversary of Heartwood has just been released. But this is also where I’d like to thank you, mightily, for being the reason that I keep trying to get the story, the one that keeps pounding my heart, right.

Nikky

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