News at Eleven: [Nikki] Finney, 52, an English professor

at the University of Kentucky, began her haunting star turn by reciting from the 1739 slave codes in her native South Carolina: "A fine of $100 and six months in prison will be imposed for anyone found teaching a slave to read or write, and death is the penalty for circulating any incendiary literature." Finney then invoked the memory of those who longed to read or write but were forbidden, and were oppressed by the cruelties of slavery. "Tonight these forbidden ones move around the room as they please, they sit at whatever table they want, wear camel-colored field hats and tomato-red kerchiefs . . . Some have just climbed out of the cold, wet Atlantic just to be here. We shiver together. If my name is ever called out, I promised my girl poet self, so too would I call out theirs."

from Time: Galley Girl: Poet Nikky Finney Dazzles the National Book Awards

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