“I had been trying to write about the Emanuel Church murders for two  years, but I didn’t want to come in through the front door,” said Finney, 61, speaking from the sunny confines of the Agnes Scott College campus.

 A National Book Award-winner, Finney is one of three notables appearing this week at Agnes Scott as part of the school’s Writers’ Festival.

The shootings at the black church had been “talked about and talked about,” she said. “I wanted to come in through a window.”

That opportunity came when she was commissioned by the Southbound Project to respond to some of the project’s photographs of the “new South.”

(The Southbound enterprise, a photography collection and exhibit, is curated by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston.)