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Kivel Carson is a storyteller, daydreamer, and organizer whose fiction conjures possibility and is concerned with Black life and labor in America. Much of her work explores complicated intergenerational relationships, the power in passing down, and both family and community as sites of memory, grief, joy, trauma, comfort, and ultimately love.

Her fiction has appeared in Blackbird Journal, Augur Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Moko Magazine, and the anthology Black From the Future (BLF Press 2019).

She is a 2023 Kimbilio fellow, a 2023 Periplus Collective fellow, and an alum of Kenyon Summer Workshop, Tin House Summer Workshop, and VONA/ Voices.

Kivel has roots in the US south, midwest, and Virgin Islands, and works in NC as a writer and organizer. In addition to fiction, she has written creative nonfiction as a journalist, including series on violent marginalization of Black communities in rural NC and in-depth reporting on the HIV/ AIDS epidemic in Kenya through Indiana University’s media school. She is a winner of NC Press Association Awards for visual storytelling and investigative reporting.

Featured Work

”The Only Recipe My Grandma Ever Wrote Down,” Blackbird Literary Journal

”Age of Aquarius,” Augur Literary Magazine

”Night Has No Eyes,” BLF Press, 2019 (first publishing) and Nightmare Magazine (reprint)

”Gianna,” Moko Literary Magazine

(Read the Publisher’s Weekly starred review of Black From the Future, and order from Indiebound.)

Check out Kivel discussing “Night Has No Eyes” on Lez Talk Books Radio podcast

Black speculative fiction writing is radical in that it says Black people, Black women, Black queer women in particular, have always been here and we will be here in the future, despite the people and systems that try to erase us or kill us, we will be here in the future and we’ll be living…

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