Asheville Writer Wins Literary Prize

Mildred Kiconco Barya of Asheville has won the 2025 Jacobs/Jones African American Literary Prize for her entry “Sing for the Women.”

Barya will receive a $1,000 prize, and The Carolina Quarterly will consider “Sing for the Women” for publication.

Creative writing judge Christian J. Collier said of Barya’s entry, “In ‘Sing for the Women,’ the writer does a fantastic job of guiding the reader through the legacy of endurance and resourcefulness that exists in the bodies of Black women. This is a work rich with care, thorough research, and interiority, and it was a delight to read.”

Barya is a North Carolina-based writer and poet of East African descent. She teaches and lectures globally, and is the author of four full-length poetry collections, including The Animals of My Earth School (Terrapin Books, 2023). Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in the New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Joyland, Tin House, The Forge, and elsewhere.

Her essay, “Being Here in This Body”, won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award and was published in the North Carolina Literary Review. Barya is an Associate professor at UNC-Asheville and coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café. She blogs at www.mildredbarya.com.

Last year her essay “Rituals of Home” was the runner-up for the Jacobs/Jones Prize. This is the third time in the contest’s history that the author of a second-place entry has won first prize the following year.

Barya will lead the poetry class “The More-than-Human World” at the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s 2025 Spring Conference, May 2-4 in Asheville.

The Jacobs/Jones contest, sponsored by the NCWN, is open to any African American writer whose primary residence is in North Carolina. Entries may be fiction or creative nonfiction, but must not have been published before (including on any website, blog, or social media), and must be no more than 3,000 words.

The Jacobs/Jones African American Literary Prize honors Harriet Jacobs and Thomas Jones, two nineteenth-century African American writers from North Carolina, and seeks to convey the rich and varied existence of African American/Black North Carolinians.

Jacobs was born in 1813 near Edenton, escaping to Philadelphia in 1842, after hiding for seven years in a crawl space above her grandmother’s ceiling. She published her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, under a pseudonym in 1861. Jacobs died in 1897 and was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 1997.

Jones was born into slavery near Wilmington in 1806. Able to purchase the freedom of his wife and all but one of his children, he followed them north in 1849 by stowing away on a brig to New York. In the northeast and in Canada, he spoke as a preacher and abolitionist, writing his memoir, The Experience of Thomas Jones, in 1854, as a way to raise funds to buy his eldest child’s freedom.

For additional information, please visit www.ncwriters.org.