Thursday, September 18
1:30 pm – 2:15 pm
Ashe County Public Library
This event is free and open to the public, no registration required.
Join us for a reading with Mildred Kiconco Barya with time for audience Q&A.
Mildred Kiconco Barya is a North Carolina-based writer and poet of East African descent. Winner of the 2025 Jacobs/Jones African American Literary Prize, and the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award, she teaches and lectures globally and is the author of four full-length poetry collections, including The Animals of My Earth School (Terrapin Books), a 2024 Eric Hoffer Award Honorable Mention, and Brittle Paper Notable African Book of 2023. Her fifth collection, Hands in Clay, will be published in Fall 2025 by Serving House Books. Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in the New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Tin House, The Forge, and elsewhere. Barya serves as the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society and coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café. She blogs here: www.mildredbarya.com
In the compassionate, playful, fable-like poems of The Animals of My Earth School, Mildred Kiconco Barya awakens us to the vividly singing, fully alive, non-human communities surrounding us. These poems demonstrate poetry’s unique ability to prick us from our self-involved numbness and awaken us to wonder. There is great solace, tenderness, and innocence here-the kind of innocence capable of apprehending the creatures of the world-and thus the world itself-afresh. Like a literary Noah’s ark of song, The Animals of My Earth School provides a place where all may dance and thrive. These poems provide pleasure and a glimmer of hope.
