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, and directed the M.F.A. in Creative and Professional Writing program for more than a dozen years. He helps coordinate the WP HyFlex Writing Workshops Series, and serves as Editor of Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art.
In 2022 he took part in the NEA Grant "Conversations in the Visual Arts through Music and Literature," and in 2024-25 he administered a Latino Poetry Grant received from the Library of America. He is currently the Chair of the WP Department of Language, Literature, Culture, and Writing.