Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020.
His writing has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, and Guernica. A recipient of the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University.
While at MacDowell in 2004 and 2006, Sickels worked on his second novel. During his 2024 residency, he worked on his third novel, about a transgender man who returns to his rural hometown. The novel will explore the complexities of masculinity, gender, and queerness, and their intersections with place and class.
