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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.
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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, Aimee 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. Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, winner of the Fiction Collective Two Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, published in 2017 by FC2/University of Alabama Press, was named one of Brooklyn Rail's best books of 2017 and received favorable reviews from Kirkus, Necessary Fiction, Brooklyn Rail, the Collagist, American Book Review, and others. Girl Zoo, co-authored with Carol Guess, was published by FC2/University of Alabama Press in February of 2019 and has been cited by Big Other and Emerging Writers Network as one of the most highly anticipated small press fiction books of 2019. Parkison's other books include the story collections Woman with Dark Horses (winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, 2004),The Innocent Party, (BOA Editions, Ltd., American Reader Series 2012), andThe Petals of Your Eyes (Starcherone/Dzanc 2014), a surrealist novel about kidnapped girls trapped in a secret theater. Along with Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, Dennis Cooper's The Marbled Swarm, and Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, The Petals of Your Eyes was cited in an A.V. Club Reading List by Brian Evenson entitled "6 Novels that Justify Making you Sick to Your Stomach." |
AwardsFiction Collective Two
Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize (NAR) Christopher Isherwood Fellowship Writers at Work Fellowship Puffin Foundation Grant North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Hearst Fellowship (American Antiquarian Society) |
AppearancesFiction Reading: Distinguished Visiting Writers Series co-sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Program featured for Women's History Month at Pittsburg State University (KS) March 29, 2018 AWP 2018, TAMPA, PANEL DISCUSSION Still in the Trenches: Gender, Race, and Class in Creative Writing. (Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Kwon Dobbs, Taiyon Coleman, Lisa Lewis, Aimee Parkison, Sagirah Shahid) Room 23, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor. Fiction Reading, Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University, home of The Laurel Review, Sept. 14, 2017 |
Recent Publications“The Wreckage of Reason: Women Writers of Contemporary Experimental Prose.” (article) AWP’s The Writers’ Chronicle magazine.
“Women Writing Violence.” (article) AWP’s The Writers’ Chronicle magazine. "Child of Prayer" (flash fiction) The Santa Fe Literary Review |