Poet Nikki Finney, a South Carolina native and daughter of a legal pioneer, has won the National Book Award for poetry. The winners were announced Wednesday evening.

Finney, 52, is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky but returns home frequently to South Carolina. Before this year’s S.C. Book Festival, she talked about one of her poems, created after witnessing defiance by homeowners facing a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

Read more at TheState.com.