Aimee Parkison is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program of Cornell University. In addition to winning the first Starcherone Fiction Prize for Woman with Dark Horses, her stories have won a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review, a Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, and a prize for emerging writers from Fiction International. She will be starting as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina – Charlotte in Fall, 2004.

Parkison's stories in Woman with Dark Horses convey violence and unrest in the lives of characters who struggle to escape the confines of small-town life and encounter murder, illicit love affairs, and loneliness.

“Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous and frightening and necessary about living in the real world” – Brian Evenson.

“These sometimes violent, sometimes visionary stories haunt the reader for days, and make the ordinary world look stranger.” – Alison Lurie.

Parkison’s work has also appeared in Other Voices, American Literary Review, River City, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions Web, Harpur Palate, BathHouse, and Quarterly West.

.

   



 



WINNER OF THE 2003 STARCHERONE FICTION PRIZE from STARCHERONE BOOKS
         Her red was a fire color, trapped inside the flames. It calmed her to look into the heat, the embers burning bright as Silas stood before her, stroking her hair. Red was the color of the bathtub when she came home from school and found her mother and her aunt completely nude, cutting off the man’s fingertips with a butcher knife taken from the kitchen. Later, she found one of his fingertips, soft yet wrinkled, drying and curling in on itself on the tile in the corner behind the bathroom door.

      - From SYMPATHY IN THE RED ROOM

         The boy was a miracle to me when I found him while passing crowded streets three years ago this winter. Only fifteen, he was two years older than I was when I left my parents for another home, starving. He had soft skin like a girl’s, a hairless face, and fiery eyes above deep shadows. His cheekbones protruded as if his skull was beginning to rise through his face. His stomach rumbled. When I bent down to kiss his forehead, I saw lice jumping in his tangled auburn hair. Every night for two weeks, I washed his scalp with medicated green shampoo. His tangles turned to curls, and I picked the dead nits out with a fine-toothed comb before the lice were gone for good.

      - From VAN WINDOWS


 

Chapbook Selections:

Corolla

The Glass Girl

The Listener

Sympathy in the Red Room

Van Windows

 



Email Aimee Parkison





Links:

- Tarpaulin Sky

- BathHouse

- Harpur Palate: Summer 2003

- Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize : 1st Prize

Conjunctions Web:


Copyright
Aimee Parkison © 2004

Published by
Starcherone Books