Michael Parker is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. He has received four career-achievement awards: the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the R. Hunt Parker Award, and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. The three-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, Parker has published short fiction and nonfiction in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, Runner's World, Men's Journal, and others. He taught for twenty-seven years in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.