A generous, gorgeous novel, with the screwball soul of Preston Sturges, Whale Man is a tempest in a driveway—a wonderful, wonderful book.

- Ashley Warlick

The whale is a hefty symbol in American literature and Alan Michael Parker's amazing new novel manages to give the behemoth fresh meaning. The writing is exquisite, the emotions fathoms deep, the plot riotously funny.  

- Jill Ciment

Here's a new poem of AMP's, from his forthcoming collection, LONG DIVISION (Tupelo Press, 2012), courtesy of Numero Cinq.


Here's a poem of AMP's, courtesy of Columbia Magazine.
 


Courtesy of Charlotte Viewpoint, here's a new interview with AMP, "Writing the Whale."


Alan Michael Parker is the author of two novels, including Whale Man (WordFarm, 2011) and Cry Uncle, along with seven collections of poems, Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, Elephants & Butterflies, Ten Days (with painter Herb Jackson), and Long Division (forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012). He served as Editor of The Imaginary Poets, and co-editor of two other volumes of scholarship. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines, and are forthcoming widely, including in The Best American Poetry, 2011 as well as the new Pushcart Prize anthology; his prose has appeared in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.

Alan Michael Parker has received numerous awards and fellowships, including two Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. As an undergraduate, he was invited to join the graduate poetry workshop at Washington University, where he studied with Donald Finkel, Howard Nemerov, and Mona Van Duyn. As a graduate student in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where he received his M.F.A. in Writing, Alan Michael Parker studied with Carolyn Forche, Richard Howard, Denis Johnson, Stanley Kunitz, William Matthews, and Nobel Laureates Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.

Since 1998, Alan Michael Parker has taught at Davidson College, where he is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing; he is also a Core Faculty Member in the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Davidson, NC, with his partner, the artist Felicia van Bork.

 

News:

Five excerpts from AMP's novel in progress, The Committee on Town Happiness, have been published in BLIP, the new Mississippi Review. Here's the link.

Three excerpts from AMP's novel in progress, The Committee on Town Happiness, have been published in Douglas Glover's Numero Cinq. Here's the link.

Writing in the Mid-American Review, John Freeman says of Elephants & Butterflies: "I would guess that Parker's brand of ironic inquiry will keep the critics busy for quite a while. Not since Wallace Stevens has America produced a poet as complex and varied as he is accessible. This collection is a must for any serious reader of American poetry."

Look for new poems and works of flash fiction by AMP in American Poetry Review, BLIP, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, OPIUM, Pleiades, and Sub-Tropics.