Author, Professor
Aimee Parkison is the author of five books of fiction. Her work has won numerous awards and fellowships. Known for fusing experimental and revisionist takes on narrative with gothic grit, dark humor, poetic style, and satire, Parkison writes to explore voices and characters, opening doors to unusual journeys through language. Her characters are often victims or perpetrators of violence, “difficult women,” or fated lovers whose happily-ever-after ends in abiding love that will not release them. Parkison’s work has appeared in numerous journals in English and in translation in Italian. Her fiction has won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from Fiction Collective Two, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship.
Aimee Parkison has taught creative writing at a number of universities, including Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Oklahoma State University. Parkison has served as a visiting faculty member at the British Council’s International Creative Writing Summer School in Athens, Greece, and as a fiction faculty member at Chautauqua Writers’ Festival. Since the summer of 2019, Parkison has served on the FC2 Board of Directors. Her flash fiction has been selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology series. She currently teaches creative writing in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University.