Backstory Talks: Carter Sickels

Join us for an evening with award-winning author Carter Sickels, as he discusses his critically acclaimed novel The Prettiest Star—a haunting, deeply moving story of love, loss, and queer identity in 1980s small-town America.

Set in 1986, The Prettiest Star follows Brian, a young gay man returning home to rural Ohio to spend his final months with his family after years in New York City, where he contracted HIV at the height of the AIDS crisis. Told through multiple voices, the novel explores the reverberations of fear, stigma, and silence—while also holding space for beauty, resilience, and human connection.

Hailed as “a brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel” (Entertainment Weekly) and “a powerful addition to the canon of AIDS literature” (Los Angeles Review of Books), The Prettiest Star won the Southern Book Prize, the Weatherford Award, and the Ohioana Book Award, among others.

### About the Author

Carter Sickels is the author of The Prettiest Star and The Evening Hour, the latter of which was adapted into a feature film that premiered at Sundance. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Guernica, Electric Literature, and Poets & Writers, among others. A Lambda Literary Award finalist and recipient of the Emerging Writer Award, he teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

✨ Carter will be joined in conversation by a special guest—speaker to be announced soon.