Dr. Cecily Parks, a new assistant professor in the English Department at Texas State University, cites environmental literature and women writers as her major influences and research interests. Inspired by her own experience in the outdoors, Dr. Parks believed early in her life that there were interesting things happening in the dialogue between literature and the environment. These themes permeate her works; Dr. Parks’s poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O’Nights are both centered on the natural world. O’Nights Is scheduled to come out in April of 2015.

Dr. Parks earned her PhD in English and American Literature at City University of New York, and her MFA in Poetry at Columbia University. Her passion for poetry began when she took a creative writing class during her senior year of college in order to fulfil a credit, and it quickly became a favorite outlet. “I liked that I could write, but it didn’t feel autobiographical,” she states. “It led me to write about things outside myself. Poetry helps me think about the world.”

Although Dr. Parks is new to Texas State University, she has over ten years of experience teaching and has been widely published in poetry anthologies, prestigious literary journals, and essay collections. Her publications this year include Birdlands, which is a poetry and print collaboration with visual artist Ken Buhler; a poem entitled “Plastic Flower” in the anthology The Petroleum Manga; “Conversation Between Fox and Field” in Another Chicago Magazine; and a scholarly publication entitled “The Secret Swamps of Susan Howe in Secret History of the Dividing Line, Thorow, and Personal Narrative,” which appears in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

In her spare time, Dr. Parks enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking and cross-country skiing. She is especially excited about reading Marilynne Robinson’s latest work, Lila, which was released this month.