Michael Parker

Michael Parker is the author of eight novels – Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World, All I Have In This World, Prairie Fever, and I Am the Light of This World--and three collections of stories, The Geographical Cure, Don’t Make Me Stop Now and Everything, Then and Since.   His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Five Points, the Georgia Review, The Southwest Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, New England Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men's Journal.  He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart and New Stories from the South anthologies, and he is a three-time winner of the O.Henry Award for short fiction. For nearly thirty years, he taught in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.  He lives in Austin, Texas.

PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF MICHAEL PARKER:

“Michael Parker knows everything about the human heart. He is an astonishing American writer.”

—Randall Kenan

“There’s a big-hearted fearlessness in Michael Parker’s work that, quite honestly, I envy.”

—Colum McCann

“Michael Parker is a novelist of immense talent.”

—Ron Rash

"In prose languid and mysterious. . . . Parker writes descriptions as precise as line engravings, more revealing than recordings or photographs."

—The Washington Post

"What makes Mr. Parker so satisfying a writer: his bone-deep affection for his characters; his love of clear, crisp, pungent language. . . his confidence in the possibility of redemption."

—Frederick Busch, The New York Times Book Review

"Only Michael Parker can tell a story you don't want to quit about folks you don't want to leave...He has us all in mind—all of us who are needy and scared and running fast from the past, all of us who believe in magic and miracle, all of us beleaguered and bewitched by love.”

—Lee K. Abbott