Alan Michael Parker

The Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English, Alan Michael Parker has taught at Davidson since 1998. His teaching interests include fiction writing, film, cartoons and comics, creativity studies, and critical theory. He often works with students interested in lives as artists or writers.

Alan Michael Parker has published four novels Cry Uncle (2006), Whale Man (2011), The Committee on Town Happiness (2014), and Christmas in July (2018); the story collection Bingo Bango Boingo (2025); and nine books of poems Days Like Prose (1997), The Vandals (1999), Love Song with Motor Vehicles (2003), The Penates (2006), Elephants & Butterflies (2007), Ten Days (2010, with painter Herb Jackson), Long Division (2012), The Ladder (2016), and The Age of Discovery (2020). His next book, Bounce! A Guide to Single-Panel Cartoons, will be published by Duke University Press in 2027. He is also a working cartoonist, with work exhibited in galleries across the United States, and more than 200 cartoons published in Identity Theory, where he contributes work weekly.

Professor Parker’s poems and stories have appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. He has published essays and reviews in The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. His poems have been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, two inclusions in Best American Poetry; the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, the Lunate 500 Prize; the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; and the 2013, 2014, and 2019 Randall Jarrell Prizes. In 2021, six of his Bingo cards were awarded the Balch Prize from Virginia Quarterly Review for the best poems published in the journal that year. Other awards include the North Carolina Book Award, the Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society for "Book of the Year," and a 2024 North Carolina Humanities works-in-progress grant for his book on cartoons.

In 2021, he judged the National Book Award in fiction; in 2024, he judged the PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction.