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. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University.