Three Rooms Press and Hub City Press present authors Julia Watts and Carter Sickels, whose award winning fiction features queer character from and/or living in rural settings, particularly Appalachia. Julia Watts’ forthcoming LGBTQ+ YA (age 16+) novel, NEEDLEWORK comes out October 5, 2021, and Carter Sickels’ novel, THE PRETTIEST STAR, is out now in Hardcover, Paperback, ebook & audiobook.

About the authors:

Born in Southeastern Kentucky, Julia Watts is the author of numerous novels for adults and young adults, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning Finding H.F.  Her novel Quiver was a finalist for the Foreword Indie Award, and her new novel, Needlework, will be released in October by Three Rooms Press. Julia lives in Knoxville with her family and assorted pets and is pursuing a PhD in Children’s and Young Adult Literature at The University of Tennessee.

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press), winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury), a 2013 Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing appears in various publications, including The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guernica, Joyland, and Catapult. Carter has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is an assistant professor at Eastern Kentucky University.