Michael Parker is the author of the novels: Hello Down There (1993), Towns Without Rivers (2001), Virginia Lovers (2004), If You Want Me To Stay (2005), The Watery Part of the World (2011), All I Have In This World (2014), Prairie Fever (2019), and three collections of stories, The Geographical Cure (1994), Don’t Make Me Stop Now (2007), Everything, Then and Since (2017).

His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various journals including Five Points, the Georgia Review, The Southwest Review, Epoch, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, Shenandoah, The Black Warrior Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men's Journal. Parker has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart, New Stories from the South and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. 

A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, Parker is the Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and since 2009 has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina and Austin, Texas.