Mildred Kiconco Barya, a North Carolina-based writer and poet of East African descent, teaches and lectures globally. Hands in Clay is her fifth full-length poetry collection. 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. Barya is the 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 is published in the New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Tin House, The Forge, and elsewhere.

Praise for Hands in Clay

If one’s hand is in clay, it means one is caught in a flux, a thickness that is somehow also seductively light. The hand and heart of this poet are drenched in a clay so rich with minerals and meaning, hazard and hope, they teach us how to make and unmake, to dream while staying awake, and to rejoice even as one grieves. Guided by the wisdom of ancestors and the not-yet-born, by goats and tea leaves and strangers in traffic, Mildred Kiconco Barya’s “lusty and persistent” poems show us how “everything is through—as in veil, if not vale.” Though the journey is from life to death to rebirth, “the fog is omnipresent” and “[e]very few seconds, the celestial / bodies exchange positions”: matter and time are recyclable, and experience ever renewed.

–Aditi Machado, Material Witness