Aimee Parkison

Author of "Sister Séance"

January 10, 2022

Aimee Parkison, recognized for her experimental fiction about women and her revisionist approach to narrative, has won numerous awards and fellowships. These include: a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship; the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from Fiction Collective Two; the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review; the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction; the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review; a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship; a Writers at Work Fellowship; a prize for writing on madness from Fiction International; a Puffin Foundation Fellowship; a William Faulkner Literary Competition Award for the Novel; and an American Antiquarian Society Creative Artists Fellowship. Parkison has taught creative writing at a number of universities, including Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Oklahoma State University, where she is a Professor of Fiction Writing in the OSU English Department's Creative Writing Program. More information is available at www.aimeeparkison.com. 

"Sister Séance" is set in Concord, Massachusetts, just after the Civil War. Spiritualism is sweeping the nation when a Halloween celebration calls for a traditional “dumb supper,” a dinner party where no guest may speak but must convey needs and desires through nonverbal communication. After the dumb supper, mysterious intruders shock the guests into confronting their pasts, uniting abolitionists, freed people, former slaveholders, a matchmaker, the single women who are her boarders, wounded Civil War veterans and a female photographer pregnant with the child of her former slave. This project was supported by an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artist Fellowship.

URL: https://library-dep.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2022-honorees/aimee-parkison

Last Updated: 19 January 2022