The Petals of Your Eyes

Aimee Parkison is a fiction writer and poet living in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A William Randolph Hearst Creative Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, Parkison is currently researching a historical novel involving wounded Civil War veterans, spiritualism, parlor games, and courtship in Victorian America. Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Parkison has received a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review. Parkison has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her first book, Woman with Dark Horses, won the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize and was published by Starcherone in 2004. Her second story collection, The Innocent Party, was published by BOA Editions' American Reader Series (2012). Parkison's work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won several awards given by literary magazines, including a prize from Fiction International for emerging writers on the subject of madness, the Jack Dyer Fiction Prize from Crab Orchard Review, and a prize from The Literary Review. Her stories and poems have appeared in the anthologies Men Undressed: Female Writers and the Male Sexual Experience, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, and Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Experimental Prose by Women Writers. In addition, Parkison's writing has been published by numerous literary magazines, including Hayden's Ferry Review, So to Speak, Nimrod, Unstuck, The Literary Review, Feminist Studies, Mississippi Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Santa Monica Review, Other Voices, Crab Orchard Review, Fiction International, Seattle Review, Lake Effect, and Denver Quarterly. More information about Aimee Parkison's work can be found at www.aimeeparkison.com.