She earned her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2002, and taught there as a lecturer of Creative Writing from September 2002 to May 2004.
Parkison worked as an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte,[1] where she taught Creative Writing, including fiction, poetry, and screenwriting.
Parkison has served as a visiting faculty member at the British Council’s International Creative Writing Summer School in Athens, Greece.
Her short story collection, Woman With the Dark Horses (2004), was selected by Cris Mazza for the first annual Starcherone Prize.
Her fourth book, a story collection entitled Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, was published by FC2 in 2017 and won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize.