[1][2] Parker is also a professor of English at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque.
Much of her work has been influenced by Zen after reading material by Alan Watts.
[3] Parker was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1952, the youngest of five children.
While writing her master's thesis, Parker relocated to the Laguna Pueblo to work with writer Leslie Marmon Silko.
She won the Kenneth Patchen Award for Innovative Fiction for the novel "Between the Legs," which was published in the fall of 2015.