Originally from Edmond, Oklahoma, AIMEE PARKISON is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program of Cornell University. Her manuscript was selected by final judge Cris Mazza as best in Starcherone's first annual blind-judged competition. She received $1,500 and publication with Starcherone Books.

Parkison's stories in Woman with Dark Horses are atmospheric and dark, incorporating murder motifs and dissociated voices and characters. Mazza praised the collection's "raw, loosely sewn, sinuous narratives which surprise the reader frequently with astonishing climaxes -- frequently a lack of climax where, in a different tradition, there seemingly should have been one." "A keen eye and ear for unique detail are at work here," said Mazza.

Not yet 30, Parkison's fiction has already won several awards: the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, an emerging writers prize from Fiction International, a Writers at Work Fellowship from Quarterly West, and the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review. Her work has also appeared in Other Voices, American Literary Review, River City, and Denver Quarterly. She became an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, in 2004.

"Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography." - Carol Anshaw

"These sometimes violent, sometimes visionary stories haunt the reader for days, and make the ordinary world look stranger." - Alison Lurie

"These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone." - Brian Evenson

"Aimee Parkison's first collection of short stories opens a Pandora's box of imagery so lush it seems to belong more properly to poetry. Some readers will be titillated by her lavish depictions of female characters who want only to be skeletal, or beautiful, and who seem to see no difference. But as with Pandora's box, Hope remains: women's studies instructors will appreciate this book's powerful insights into the situation of Woman oppressed by conventional standards of beauty and sexuality. - Lisa Lewis, author of Silent Treatment and The Unbeliever