Join us for a special poetry event featuring local writers Mildred Kiconco Barya—author of Hands in Clay—and Clint Bowman—author of If Lost—both reading from their new books!
Mildred K Barya’s most recent poetry collection, Hands in Clay, is published by Serving House
Books, 2025. Her previous poetry books include The Animals of My Earth School (Terrapin
Books), which was listed among Brittle Paper Notable African Books of 2023 and received
honorable mention in the 2024 Eric Hoffer Poetry Award. Mildred is a recipient of the 2025
Jacobs/Jones African American Literary Prize and the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award.
She has served as the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society and her work has been published in the New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Tin House, The Forge, and elsewhere. She lives in Asheville, NC.
About Hands in Clay
“A radical, radiant melancholy is the light that comes from Mildred Kiconco Barya’s poems. Moonlight, hellfire, komorebi—light filtered through leaves. And the light from fires—buried, rekindled, luminous—a cremating fire of ritual and transformation of experience. Barya has a discourse with the spirit world in dreams and receives messages from ancestors, phantom children, and the dead which proves the real world is porous and miraculous. Barya has a witchy power and has written a haunted book that manufactures wonder.” —Bruce Smith, Hungry Ghost
Clint Bowman is a writer from Black Mountain, NC. During the day, he works as a recreation coordinator leading hikes, river cleanups, and other outdoor programs throughout the Swannanoa Valley. Co-founder and facilitator of the Dark City Poets Society—a free poetry group based out of the Black Mountain Library— Clint’s debut full-length collection of poetry, If Lost, was published in 2024 by Loblolly Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry South, Louisiana Literature, O. Henry Magazine, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.
About If Lost
Inspired by the mountains, forests, animals, and people that define the region, Bowman’s work offers a raw and poignant exploration of a landscape in flux—one where natural beauty and human resilience collide with environmental decay and societal neglect.
In If Lost, Bowman acts as both guide and witness, leading readers through a tapestry of vivid imagery and haunting narratives. Invasive species choke native trees, abandoned churches crumble beside failing gas stations, and truckers cry in empty parking lots. Along highways lined with restless deer, Bowman’s poems examine how everyone—and everything—is searching for meaning, shelter, or escape in a world that feels perpetually on the brink.