Events

Wed 5/9 7pm-8pm Carter Sickels reads from & signs his debut novel The Evening Hour Bloomsbury, ISBN: 9781608195978 $16.00 pb “Intensely lyrical… Sickels has great insight into the emotional life of West Virginians, and he refreshingly presents them as fully realized characters rather than as clichés or stereotypes.” – Kirkus “[The Evening Hour] is grounded in rich storytelling.” – Publishers Weekly “Newcomer Carter Sickels strips away all rural romance in The Evening Hour…Though some of these elements—meth, evil mining company—seem a little familiar, Sickels fashions a miniature epic out of them, less activist tract than redemption story.” – Outside Magazine In the economically depressed landscape of Dove Creek, West Virginia, most of the wealth is in the earth—in the coal seams that have provided generations with a way of life. Born and raised here, Cole Freeman has sidestepped work as a miner to become a nursing home aid—and a small-time drug dealer, reselling the prescription drugs his older patients give him. In The Evening Hour, debut novelist Carter Sickels reveals the inner workings of a small mountain community devastated by the arrival of a mining corporation           Carter Sickels, a graduate of the M.F.A. program at Pennsylvania State University, was awarded scholarships and residencies to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, the Djerassi Residency, and Fundación Valparaíso. After spending nearly a decade in New York, Sickels left the city to earn a master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is now living in the Pacific Northwest.