Award-Winning novelist Carter Sickels to read at OSU-Cascades May 14
Campbell Porter
BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) — Award-winning novelist Carter Sickels will read from his work at Oregon State University-Cascades on May 14. The event is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. as part of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing’s Distinguished Visiting Writer series.
The presentation will take place in the Charles McGrath Family Atrium in Edward J. Ray Hall on the university’s Bend campus. The series brings prominent authors to the school to engage with the public and lead workshops for graduate students.
Sickels authored the novel “The Prettiest Star,” which earned the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award. The book was also named the Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. Their debut novel, “The Evening Hour,” was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award. That story follows a young man in Appalachia during the opioid crisis and was adapted into a film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020.
Beyond his novels, Sickels’ fiction and essays have been published in national outlets including The Atlantic, Outside Magazine, BuzzFeed and Poets & Writers. His work has also appeared in The Kenyon Review and various other literary journals. In 2024, he received the Lambda Literary Duggins Prize for Outstanding Mid-Career LGBTQ Novelists and was previously a finalist for the John Dos Passos Prize in Literature.
Sickels currently serves as an assistant professor of English and creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at North Carolina State University. He previously earned a master’s degree in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His career has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
The Distinguished Visiting Writer series brings authors to the Bend campus to lead workshops for graduate students. Previous participants in the program have included novelist Raquel Gutiérrez, autofiction writer Hannah Pittard, short story writer Justin Taylor and poets Rebecca Morgan Frank and André Naffis-Sahely.
The upcoming event will conclude with a book signing. Local bookstore Roundabout Books will be on-site to facilitate book sales for attendees. Admission to the reading is free, though the university requires all guests to register in advance.
Interested attendees can register for the event at beav.es/carter-sickels. Those requiring accommodations for disabilities are asked to contact 541-322-3100 or email events@osucascades.edu.