Aimee Parkison
Personal Information
Description
The oldest of four children, Aimee Parkison was born in Durant, Oklahoma. She currently resides in Charlotte, North Carolina. Parkison has received a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize. When she’s not reading, writing, playing surrealist word games, daydreaming, journaling, or teaching, she’s usually hanging out at local coffee shops with her husband Abelardo, playing video games, spending time with her seven cats, or enjoying a glass of red wine. Parkison writes fiction and poetry. She has an MFA from Cornell University and is an Associate Professor of English at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing. Just after she finished graduate school, her first story collection, Woman with Dark Horses, won the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize. BOA Edition’s American Reader Series published her recent story collection, The Innocent Party, in 2012. Parkison’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous magazines, including Feminist Studies, Mississippi Review, North American Review, Cimarron Review, Quarterly West, Santa Monica Review, Other Voices, Lake Effect, Tarpaulin Sky, PMS, 5AM, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, So to Speak, Nimrod, The Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fiction International, Seattle Review, Rattle, and Denver Quarterly.
Books
Woman with dark horses
Winner of the 1st Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, chosen by Cris Mazza -- The stories in Woman with Dark Horses are atmospheric and dark, incorporating murder motifs and dissociated voices and characters. Mazza praised the collection's "raw, loosely sewn, sinuous narratives which surprise the reader frequently with astonishing climaxes — frequently a lack of climax where, in a different tradition, there seemingly should have been one." "A keen eye and ear for unique detail are at work here," said Mazza.
The Innocent Party
In this collection of prize-winning stories, characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, “Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography.”
The petals of your eyes
Kidnapped girls trapped in a remote theater surrounded by mountains and jungle are forced into illegal performances, displayed in cabinets with curiosities, their delicate limbs bound by straps, and accompanied by dancing puppets fashioned of dead children's bones.
