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Kate Gray takes an unblinking look at bullying in her debut novel, Carry the Sky. It’s 1983 at an elite Delaware boarding school. Taylor Alta, the new rowing coach, arrives reeling from the death of the woman she loved. Physics teacher Jack Song, the only Asian American on campus, struggles with his personal code of honor when he gets too close to a student. These two young, lonely teachers narrate the story of a strange and brilliant thirteen-year-old boy who draws atomic mushroom clouds on his notebook, pings through the corridors like a pinball, and develops a crush on an older girl with secrets of her own. Carry the Sky sings a brave and honest anthem about what it means to be different in a world of uniformity.
“In the rich rarified world of a prep school, Kate Gray has woven two powerful personal stories into a charged and compelling human novel which shows us that swimming under that quirky, antic, off-beat community are also life and death. Gray has a sharp eye and tells her story with verve and a deft touch.”
– Ron Carlson, author of The Signal and A Kind of Flying
“Lyrical, moving, and hauntingly beautiful, Kate Gray’s Carry the Sky winds between two voices, Taylor and Song, both navigating the narrow lanes of St. Timothy’s boarding school where they teach, both hitting the walls that surround them. One uses science to make sense of loneliness, loss, and desirethe other uses the beat of a rower’s oar in water. Together these two outsiders struggle to move past mourning, to seek hope as they crack open their insular world. Carry the Sky is full of unforgettable characters and images, each word carefully chosen, like a perfect fold in a paper crane, creating a graceful neck, strong tail, and mighty wings, perched on the edge of the page, ready to take flight.”
– Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and co-founder of One Story
“A splendid debut novel, beautifully written and brimming over with humanity and grace, alternately humorous and heart-wrenching.”
– Christopher Buckley, author of But Enough About You
“Set in a boarding school in 1983, Carry the Sky is a haunting exploration of loneliness, grief, and desire. In lyrical, elegant prose, Kate Gray spins a tale of characters struggling to forgive themselves and to find each other, and reminds us to pay attention to the ordinary and unexpected flashes of beauty around us: a brilliant kite, geese overhead, a paper crane in a tree.”
– Carter Sickels, author of The Evening Hour
About the author
A rower for years, Kate Gray coached crew and taught in an East Coast boarding school at the start of her career. Now after more than twenty years teaching at a community college in Oregon, Kate tends her students’ stories. Her first full-length book of poems, Another Sunset We Survive (2007), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and followed chapbooks, Bone Knowing (2006), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize, and Where She Goes (2000), winner of the Blue Light Chapbook Prize. Over the years she’s been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Norcroft, and Soapstone, and a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts. She and her partner live in a purple
Graphic designer Gigi Little is the creative force behind Forest Avenue Press’ visual identity. Outside of the domain of Forest Avenue, she has written and illustrated two children’s picture books and her fiction and essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, fine artist Stephen O’Donnell. Before moving to Portland, Gigi spent fifteen years in the circus, as a lighting director and professional circus clown. She never took a pie to the face and never got stuffed into one of those little cars, but she is a Rhodes scholar on the art of losing one’s pants.
