Linda Parsons

Poet and essayist Linda Parsons earned a BA and an MA in English literature from the University of Tennessee. She is the author of the poetry collections Home Fires (1997), Mother Land (2008), and Bound (2011), and Candescent (2019). Her subjects include gardening, childhood, and family history—five generations, from her granddaughter through her own grandmother, are depicted in Bound.

Parson’s poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, the Chattahoochee Review, The Baltimore Review, Shenandoah, and others. Her essays and poems have been published in the anthologies Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (1999), Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry (2002), and Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (2003). Her column “The Writing Well” appeared in New Millennium Writings from 1995 to 2000. She currently coordinates WordStream, WDVX-FM’s weekly reading series with Stellasue Lee and is the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.  Parsons is the copyeditor and proofreader for Chapter 16, Tennessee’s literary website, and was also playwright-in-residence for the Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Parson is a member of the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. She has received grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Knoxville Arts Council as well as a Tennessee Writers Alliance award in poetry. She works as an editor and a policy analyst for the University of Tennessee’s internal audit department. In 2020, she was poetry editor for Texas-based Madville Publishing.