John Parras
John Parras received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he is the author of Fire on Mount Maggiore (University of Tennessee Press, 2005), which won the Peter Taylor Prize for the novel. In 2016, he was awarded a prose fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts.
His creative work has appeared in Conjunctions, Salmagundi, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, Oasis and other literary journals, and his chapbook Dangerous Limbs: Prose Poems and Flash Fictions (2013) is published by Kattywompus Press.
A Professor at William Paterson University, he chaired the Faculty Senate from 2011-2013. He currently coordinates the M.F.A. in Creative and Professional Writing program, directs the WPU English Department's annual Spring Writer's Conference, and serves as Editor of Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art.
In 2016 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.