The award-winning novelist and essayist Carter Sickels will read from his work at Oregon State University – Cascades on May 14 as part of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing’s Distinguished Visiting Writer series.
Sickels will present and read from his work at a public event at 6:30 p.m. in the Charles McGrath Family Atrium in Edward J. Ray Hall on the OSU-Cascades campus.
The event is free, but registration is required. A book signing will follow, with book sales hosted by Roundabout Books.
Sickels is the author of the novel “The Prettiest Star,” for which he was awarded the 2021 Southern Book Prize and Weatherford Award. The novel was selected as the Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine.
His debut novel, “The Evening Hour,” was an Oregon Book Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist. It tells the story of a young man’s journey through the opioid crisis in Appalachia and was adapted into a film of the same name that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020.
Sickels’ essays and fiction have appeared in Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed and in The Kenyon Review and other literary journals. He is the 2024 recipient of Lambda Literary’s Duggins Prize for Outstanding Mid-Career LGBTQ Novelists, and he was a finalist for the John Dos Passos Prize in Literature. He has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and MacDowell.
Sickels is an assistant professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University. He earned a master’s degree in folklore from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Visiting writers in the MFA in Writing program at OSU-Cascades lead graduate students in workshops. Past visiting writers have included award-winning authors such as novelist Raquel Gutiérrez, autofiction writer Hannah Pittard, novelist and short story writer Justin Taylor, and poets Rebecca Morgan Frank and André Naffis-Sahely.
To register for the reading, visit beav.es/carter-sickels. For accommodations for disabilities contact 541-322-3100 or events@osucascades.edu.
About OSU-Cascades: Oregon State University’s campus in Bend brings higher education to Central Oregon, the fastest growing region in the state. Surrounded by mountains, forest and high desert, OSU-Cascades is a highly innovative campus of a top-tier land grant research university, offering small classes that accelerate faculty-student mentoring and experiential learning. Degree programs meet industry and economic needs in areas such as innovation and entrepreneurship, natural ecosystems, health and wellness, and arts and sciences, and prepare students for tomorrow’s challenges. OSU-Cascades is expanding to serve 3,000 to 5,000 students, building a 128-acre campus with net-zero goals.