John A Parras

John Parras received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose, John Parras is the author of Fire on Mount Maggiore (University of Tennessee Press, 2005), which won the Peter Taylor Prize for the novel. His creative work has appeared in Conjunctions, Salmagundi, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, Oasis and other literary journals, and his chapbook Dangerous Limbs: Prose Poems and Flash Fictions (2013) is published by Kattywompus Press. A Professor at William Paterson University, he chaired the Faculty Senate from 2011-2013. He currently coordinates the M.F.A. in Creative and Professional Writing program, directs the WPU English Department's annual Spring Writer's Conference, and serves as Editor of Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art. In 2016 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and is a contributor to the NEA Grant "Conversations in the Visual Arts through Music and Literature" awarded to the University Galleries for 2022.

To meet with me in my Virtual Office, go to https://wpunj.zoom.us/my/john.parras during my office hours or at our mutually agreed upon appointment time.

Other Interests

Selected Works
"Girl Gone Haywire: Reb Livingston's 'Bombyonder' and the State of the Novel"
"Carlo Mollino's Erotic Polaroids at Gagosian"
"Marouflage," a story with audio
"Song of Magsaysay," historical fiction
"Ride," a flash fiction
"Twitter Mind: On Jennifer Egan's 'Black Box'"
On V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River
"Poetic Prose and Imperialism: The Ideology of Form in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness"
"Literary Theory in the Creative Writing Workshop" (The Journal of Teaching Writing)