Carter Sickels is the author of The Pretties Star. He was a 2013 Oregon Book Award finalist for his first novel, The Evening Hour, and recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award. His writing appears in The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guernica, Joyland, and Catapult. He is an assistant professor at Eastern Kentucky University, and lives in Lexington.