Carter Sickels, author of the just-published novel, The Prettiest Star, will be hosted by Sara DiVello on South End Writes via ZOOM on Monday, June 22 at 6:30 PM (details below). The date was changed to June 22 June from 23rd due to a last-minute scheduling conflict.

Although The Prettiest Star takes place in the 1980s, when an HIV-infected son returns to his conservative family’s home in Ohio to die, a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution review suggests the theme of the “toll on smalltown America” during the AIDS epidemic is not dissimilar to the impact on rural America of the Covid-19 pandemic of today. “What happens when a son comes back home, and he’s sick with the most feared disease of our time?” is the question posed ? Kirkus Reviews called the book a “brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel.”

Sickel’s 2012 debut novel The Evening Hour, finalist for both the Oregon Book and Lambda Literary awards, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. His essays and fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guernica, and the Bellevue Literary Review. Carter was the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award. Other honors include earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony.

Carter is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. In a 2012 interview with The Advocate, Carter said that, as a trans person he identified as queer. “For me personally, queer is the more progressive and inclusive label, and also has a more political angle — to be queer is to not fit in the norms created by a heterosexist, patriarchal culture, and to call into question those norms. Queer is one part of my identity. I also identify as a gay man, and as trans.”