GREENSBORO — Alan Michael Parker of Davidson is the winner of the 2014 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition for his poem, “Lights Out in the Chinese Restaurant.”
Parker also won in 2013, making him the first two-time winner in the history of the competition. He will receive $200 and publication in a special supplement of storySouth.
“I love this poem,” said final judge Jillian Weise. “It begins in a realist mode with a speaker at a restaurant and then the lights go out. The poem makes a quantum leap into the irreal and necrodaisical: a word the poem caused me to invent so that I could describe the speaker’s listless attitude toward having died. Part nightmare, part ars poetica: the poem is superlatively unsettling.”
Parker is the author of eight collections of poems, including his most recent, “Long Division,” which won the 2012 North Carolina Book Award. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including three Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, the 2013 and 2014 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition Awards, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
His 2011 novel, “Whale Man,” was shortlisted for the 2011 ForeWord Reviews’ “Book of the Year Award” in the category of Literary Fiction. He is also the author of the novels Cry Uncle and The Committee on Town Happiness.
Since 1998, he has taught at Davidson College, where he was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2007; in 2012, he was named Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English.
He also teaches in the University of Tampa Low-Residency M.F.A. program, where he works with graduate student writers in both poetry and fiction. He lives in Davidson with his wife, the artist Felicia van Bork, and her Pecha Kucha alter ego, Candi Parker.