Kivel Carson is a storyteller and daydreamer living in the southern Blackbelt, making work for and about the communities she belongs to, because she knows the South got something to say. Her fiction explores human relationships, the many coming of ages we experience in life, Black American spiritual traditions, visions of liberation, and futures where Black people not only exist but have rich, meaningful lives.

Her short stories have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Moko Magazine, and the speculative fiction Anthology Black From the Future, edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle, BLF Press. (Read the publisher’s weekly starred review here, and order through Indiebound here.)

Kivel has roots in the south, midwest, and Virgin Islands, and works in NC now as a writer and organizer. In addition to publishing fiction, she has published creative non-fiction as a journalist, including in-depth reporting on the HIV/ AIDS crisis in Kenya through Indiana University’s media school. She is a winner of NC Press Association Awards for storytelling and investigative reporting.

Featured Work

Night Has No Eyes

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…