(Corthron, Kia) Kia Corthron is a playwright whose award-winning works have premiered across the country, as well as London. As a screenwriter, she contributed to the acclaimed, award-winning television show, The Wire. Her first novel is The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (Seven Stories Press), which was awarded The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize in 2016. On the eve of America’s entry into World War II, four boys from two families, two white and two black, grow up in small-town America. The four mature into men directly confronting the fierce resistance to the early civil rights movement, and are all ultimately uprooted, navigating a deaf urban world, the working class suburbs of the early calculator boom, a community fresh from the Panther heyday being accosted by the onset of AIDS. Their journey culminates in an explosive and devastating encounter between the two families. The New York Times Sunday Book Review writes, “[The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter] succeeds admirably in a novel’s first and most difficult task: It makes you give a damn. It also does well by a novel’s second task: It sends you away pondering what it has to say.”
