John Parras

My newest work is a chapbook, "Dangerous Limbs: Prose Poems and Flash Fictions," published by Kattywompus Press in 2013.

Currently I am the editor of Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art.

Previously I have been lucky enough to win a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Fiction Writing. I studied at Carnegie-Mellon and Columbia universities and garnered a Columbia University President's Fellowship, the Pauline B. Adamson Award for Fiction, and the Maurice Robinson Award for Professional Writing. More recently I was awarded a Prose Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

My novel, "Fire on Mount Maggiore," received the Peter Taylor Prize and is published by the University of Tennessee Press. The novel, which is based on first-hand experience battling brush fires in Italy, was also a finalist in the Associated Writing Programs Contest in the Novel, in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, and in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. In 2006 the novel received Silver Prize in the Foreword Book of the Year Awards for Literary Fiction.

Poems and stories of mine have appeared in magazines such as "Salmagund," "Painted Bride Quarterly," "Quick Fiction," "Salt Hill," "The Dominion Review," and "Oasis." I currently teach Creative Writing and Literature at William Paterson University in New Jersey.