Nikki Skies

Nikki Skies is an eloquent writer/performer with a mission to “put voice to women and children and the holistic liberation for people of color.” She is an award-winning actress, and a nationally known performance poet, lecturer and author. She is a unique voice among her generation, threading information and entertainment to gracefully bridge audiences across barriers of color lines, religion and politics with her fiery yet compassionate performance poetry style. Her passion for theatre and writing led to studies for her B.A. and M.F.A. in Theatre and Screenplay Writing. Nikki has been honored with writing and acting awards from the NAACP, National Association of Dramatic Speech Arts, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and various local theatre councils. Nikki’s ambition eventually moved her from the Midwest state of Missouri to Los Angeles, where she turned her spotlight from theatre to spoken word. Nikki quickly became a highly sought after feature performer and is noted as one of the trailblazing female poets on the underground poetry and hip hop scene in LA.

For the past nine years, she has garnered the spotlight at over 100 colleges and universities, conferences and festivals across the country. Nikki has had several television/film appearances such as BET’s Lyric Cafe, and documentaries for PBS and Jive records. Nikki has been described as being “full of artistic intensity” and was chosen by Geffen records A&R to be the featured poet on a project featuring major recording artists. She has shared panels and opened for artists and activists such as Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni, Elaine Brown, Jill Scott, The Last Poets, just to name a few. Her one-woman play that portrays voices of three prominent women woven together from the civil rights movement has been showcased at fundraising events and several art festivals.

Her speaking engagements for various national and international organizations, most notably, Doctors Without Borders during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, served as one of the platforms for her book, “Mississippi Window Cracks”. This book is been awarded best selling self published of 2007 by Outskirts Publishing. Over the years, Nikki’s poetry has been used as curriculum in the Oakland women’s prison system and published in various poetry anthologies. Nikki has worked with the Orange County Human Relations Arts Commission as an Educator and with a non-profit organization in Watts, California as Program Director for “at risk youth” in after school arts programming. Nikki says she wants to “develop a body of literature to be studied in the tomorrows.”