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CONCORDIA CELEBRATES THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS
The college is pleased to announce Nikky Finney and David Grann will be the featured authors for the Concordia Celebrates the National Book Awards event on March 10-11. In this 16th year of bringing National Book Award authors to campus, the college looks back by featuring a past winner and finalist. Finney is the 2011 poetry winner for her work, “Head Off & Split” and Grann is a 2017 nonfiction finalist for his book, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The authors will speak at the Readings and Conversation event, hosted by former NPR correspondent John Ydstie, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 10, in the Centrum, Knutson Campus Center.
Finney’s poetry collection sustains a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life. Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime. She teaches 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.
In Grann’s book, he revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and startling new evidence, the book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction. It’s also a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. His stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Washington Post, among others.
Ydstie earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Concordia College in 1974 with a major in English literature and a minor in speech communications. He covered the economy, Wall Street, and the federal budget for NPR for two decades and was a regular guest host on the NPR news programs Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and Talk of the Nation. Ydstie retired in November 2019.
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