We can’t bring Carter Sickels to Malaprop’s as originally planned but we’re pleased to be part of the Reader Meet Writer Okra Pick series of online events hosted by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.
The event is free but registration is required. Please CLICK HERE TO REGISTER. You can pre-order the book below.
If you elect to attend, we will email you on the day of the event with the link & password required to attend on Zoom.
Small-town Appalachia doesn’t have a lot going for it, but it’s where Brian is from, where his family is, and where he’s chosen to return to die. At eighteen, Brian, like so many other promising young gay men, arrived in New York City without much more than a love for the freedom and release from his past that it promised. But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape. Set in 1986, a year after Rock Hudson’s death shifted the public consciousness of the epidemic and brought the news of AIDS into living rooms and kitchens across America, The Prettiest Star is part Dog Years by Mark Doty and part Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. But it is also an urgent story now: it a novel about the politics and fragility of the body; it is a novel about sex and shame. And it is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable. It is written at the far reaches of love and understanding, and zeroes in on the moments where those two forces reach for each other, and sometimes touch.
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Evening Hour. He is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and has been awarded scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, VCCA, and the MacDowell Colony. His essays and fiction have appeared in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, and BuzzFeed, and he is the editor of Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity. Carter is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers Studio Low-Residency MFA program. He lives in Lexington, KY. He will be in conversation with Wiley Cash, author of The Last Ballad.
Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase a book by the author, we ask that you purchase it from Malalprop’s. When you do this you are supporting the work it takes to run an events program, telling publishers that they should send authors here, and keeping more dollars in our community. Thank you!
