Series hosts fiction writer Amy Parker

  Monday, September 19, 2016 2:00 AM
  News

Pittsburg, KS

Fiction writer Amy Parker will read from her own work at 8 p.m, Thursday, Sept. 22, in the Governors Room in Pittsburg State University’s Overman Student Center. Admission is free. Parker’s visit is sponsored by the PSU English Department’s Distinguished Visiting Writers series and the Student Fee Council. A reception will follow.

Born in Okinawa, Japan, Parker spent most of her childhood on diplomatic and military compounds overseas. She attended the University of Texas, Austin, where she won a Michener fellowship in fiction followed by four years at Tassajera Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Soto Zen monastery in the U.S., where she studied intensive monastic practice. She also studied at Green Gulch Farm as well as Zen Center in Mill Valley, Calif. Parker graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2012 after leaving the monastery. She currently lives with her son in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Parkers first novel, “Beasts and Children,” is a collection of linked stories that cover a variety of topics such as the tense territory of a sagging, grand porch in Texas, a gated community in Thailand, a lonely apartment in nondescript suburbia, and unwinding the lives of three families as they navigate ever-shifting landscapes.

Her short stories have been published in multiple journals such as Connu, Interfictions, Unstuck Magazine, and At Length Magazine.