John Parras

John Parras received a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Fiction Writing. He studied at Carnegie-Mellon and Columbia universities and has been the recipient of a Columbia University President’s Fellowship, the Pauline B. Adamson Award for Fiction, and the Maurice Robinson Award for Professional Writing.

His novel, Fire on Mount Maggiore (2005), won the Peter Taylor Prize and is published by the University of Tennessee Press. Based on the author’s first-hand experience battling brush fires in Italy, the novel also received Silver Prize in the 2006 Foreword Book of the Year Awards for Literary Fiction.

His creative work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Quick Fiction, Salt Hill, Xconnect, Gulf Stream, Oasis and other literary journals. A Professor of English, Dr. Parras teaches Creative Writing and Literature at William Paterson University and travels frequently to Italy.