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Michael Parker

Biography

Michael Parker

Michael Parker is the author of eight novels and three collections of stories. 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 30 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.

Michael Parker

Books by Michael Parker

I Am the Light of This World
by Michael Parker - Fiction

In the early 1970s, in Stovall, Texas, 17-year-old Earl meets Tina, the new girl in town. Tina convinces Earl to drive her to see her mother in Austin, where Earl and Tina are quickly separated. Two days later, Earl is being questioned by the police about Tina’s disappearance and the blood in the trunk of his car. But Earl can’t remember what happened in Austin, and with little financial support from his working-class family, he is sentenced for a crime he did not commit. Forty years later, Earl is released into a world he can barely navigate. Settling in a small town on the Oregon coast, he attempts to establish a sense of freedom. But just as Earl finds the rhythm he’s always sought, his past returns to endanger the new life he’s built.

Prairie Fever
by Michael Parker - Fiction, Historical Fiction

The Stewart sisters, pragmatic Lorena and chimerical Elise, are bound together not only by their isolation on the prairie of early 1900s Oklahoma, but also by their deep emotional reliance on each other. They’re all they’ve got...until Gus McQueen arrives in Lone Wolf. An inexperienced first-time teacher, Gus is challenged by the sisters’ wit and ingenuity. Then one impulsive decision and a cataclysmic blizzard trap Elise and her horse on the prairie --- and the balance of everything is forever changed.