Poetry with Mildred Barya & Laura-Gray Street

Mildred Barya and Laura-Gray Street will visit City Lights for a poetry reading on Saturday, October 4th at 1:00pm. Mildred will read from her new collection, Hands in Clay, and Laura-Gray from her latest work, Just Labor.

Mildred Kiconco Barya’s Hands in Clay is her fifth full-length poetry collection. Her previous books include The Animals of My Earth School (Terrapin Books, 2023). She’s 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 is published in the New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café and blogs at www.mildredbarya.com

Laura-Gray Street is the author of Pigment and Fume, Shift Work, and Just Labor, and co-editor of three anthologies: The Ecopoetry Anthology, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology. A 2022 – 2025 Black Earth Institute fellow, Street is the Mary Frances Williams Professor of English, directs the Visiting Writers Series, and edits Revolute at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. For more, visit lauragraystreet.com

You may also like the following events from City Lights Bookstore:

• This Saturday, 16th August, 11:00 am, Mountain Words Writers Group Reading in Sylva
• This Saturday, 16th August, 03:00 pm, C.L. Willis presents HILLBILLY ODYSSEY: RESILIENCE IN A SMALL MOUNTAIN MILL TOWN with Tom Rash in Sylva
• Next Saturday, 23rd August, 03:00 pm, Michael Hettich & Sebastian Matthews in Sylva

Also check out other Arts events in Sylva, Literary Art events in Sylva.