A Ugandan author has received an honourable mention at this year’s Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize.
Mildred Kiconco Barya’s Ritual of Home has been hailed as a meditative prose piece about nature, and the fragile ecosystem we are entrusted to steward for our future by an esteemed panel.
DéLana RA Dameron, the final judge, also hailed Ritual of Home for providing a sense of “how we find home wherever we go.”
Barya is a North Carolina-based writer and a Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet.
She teaches and lectures globally, and is the author of four full-length poetry collections. Her most recent body of work—The Animals of My Earth School—was published by Terrapin Books, 2023.
The Ugandan’s prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in New England Review, Shenandoah, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Forge, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of creative nonfiction.
Being Here in This Body, Barya’s most recent essay, won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award and was published in the North Carolina Literary Review. She serves on the boards of African Writers Trust, Story Parlor, and coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café.
“When I’d just moved to Asheville, I was struck by the way this scenic region resembled my childhood geography. I had moved thousands of miles only to end up in a somewhat similar landscape,” Barya, who grew up in Kabale, said, adding, “I was curious about the issues affecting the area and quickly realised that regardless of where one resides nowadays, all the natural habitats and biodiversity of the world are in danger of deforestation and destruction.”
Barya can take inspiration from this year’s winner of the Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize.
After receiving an honourable mention during last year’s contest, Brenda C Wilson of Charlotte won this year’s Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize for her story Unburied Dreams Rising. Wilson will receive a $1,000 (Shs3.9m) prize, and The Carolina Quarterly will consider Unburied Dreams Rising for publication.
“Unburied Dreams Rising is a story about inheritance and home/homeland. For Lacey, the dutiful daughter returned home for her mother’s end-of-life care, holding onto the land that had been ingrained in them—the land was their legacy,” Dameron said.
Brenda C Wilson of Charlotte won this year’s Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize for her story Unburied Dreams Rising. PHOTOS | COURTESY
She added: “I really enjoyed this story centring around a family who are nostalgic for the past, while bracing against a family who want to move forward. Through clear and quiet prose, Unburied Dreams Rising is a story so many of us inherit and wade through.”
Wilson has an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. Her short stories have appeared in The Maryland Review and Boundoff. She was a finalist in the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Contest and also in Ebony Magazine’s Gertrude Johnson Williams Literary Contest.
Her novel, A Cakewalk to Memphis, was a quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.
Dameron, this year’s final judge, is an artist whose primary medium is storytelling.
Her first book of fiction, Redwood Court, was released this month from Random House. She is a graduate of New York University’s MFA programme in poetry and holds a BA degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dameron’s debut poetry collection, How God Ends Us, was selected by Elizabeth Alexander for the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. Her second collection, Weary Kingdom, was also chosen by Nikky Finney for the Palmetto Poetry Series. Dameron is also the founder of Saloma Acres, an equestrian and cultural space in her hometown in South Carolina, where she resides.
The Jacobs/Jones contest, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network, 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). They also must be no more than 3,000 words. The winner receives $1,000 and possible publication of the winning entry in The Carolina Quarterly.
The Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize honours the 19th Century writers Harriet Jacobs and Thomas H Jones, two pioneering 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 ship 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. This prize was initiated by Cedric Brown, a Winston-Salem native and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The literary award was borne out of my frustration with being unable to readily find much fiction or creative nonfiction that conveys the rich and varied existence of Black North Carolinians,” Brown said. “I wanted to incentivise the development of written works while also encouraging Black writers to capture our lives through storytelling.”
The non-profit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organisation devoted to all writers at all stages of development.
