Biography
Cecily Parks is the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Seeds (Alice James Books, 2025), winner of the UNT Rilke Prize, the Women Writing the West 2026 WILLA Award in Poetry, and the 2025 Writers' League of Texas Book Award in Poetry. This collection was also a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award and named one of NPR's Books We Love. Her previous collections are O'Nights (Alice James Books, 2015), winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, and Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008), finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Shenandoah / Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. She is the guest editor of Best New Poets 2025 (University of Virginia Press, 2025) and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2016). Individual poems of hers have been awarded the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award and the Pushcart Prize and appear in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Nation, The New Republic, and several editions of The Best American Poetry. At Texas State, she teaches a range of courses in poetry and poetry writing.
Research Interests
Poetry and Poetics, Memoir, Environmental Literature
Teaching Interests
Recent Courses:
Graduate:
Small Poems
Poetic Memoirs and Memoirs by Poets
Form and Theory of Poetry
Poetry Workshop
Undergraduate:
Senior Seminar in Poetry Writing
Creative Writing: Poetry
American Poetry
Graduate:
Small Poems
Poetic Memoirs and Memoirs by Poets
Form and Theory of Poetry
Poetry Workshop
Undergraduate:
Senior Seminar in Poetry Writing
Creative Writing: Poetry
American Poetry