Carl Parsons
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Carl Parsons grew up in the Mid-Ohio Valley of West Virginia, where many of his stories are set. He obtained a BA and MA in English Literature from West Virginia University and completed PhD coursework at the University of Pittsburgh. He also has a MS in Manufacturing Management from Kettering University. After a long career in the auto industry, which included management positions in labor relations and manufacturing operations, he retired to a second career of writing, teaching, and volunteer work. He taught writing and literature for Walters State Community College and worked as an associate editor for crime fiction with Fiction Magazines. Currently, he serves as a Master Gardener for the University of Tennessee Extension Office in Sevier County (TN) and leads the Classics Book Club of Sevier County.
His publication credits include eleven short stories appearing in The Broadkill Review, The Raven Review, Scars Publications, and Spillwords Press. His poetry has appeared in Plum Tree Tavern and Literary Yard. He is a member of West Virginia Writers, Inc. More recently, he has published a political thriller with Wordwooze Publishing entitled Trios: Death, Deceit, and Politics as well as a family saga, Locust Hill, available on Spillwords Press. His publishing awards include Contributor of the Year (2023) from Spillwords Press for Locust Hill and Literary Titan Book Award (July 2023) for Trios. He currently resides in Kodak, TN, just outside of Knoxville, within sight of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. |
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Trios: Death, Deceit, and Politics
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Political Thriller
As Rita Collins, a young news reporter/writer, seeks the reasons why her Iraq War-wounded husband rejects her and physical therapy, she uncovers a tangled web of political, personal, and academic corruption in which she herself has become caught. 
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Shantyboat: American Dystopia
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Dystopian Fantasy
Following a gradual loss of freedoms and prosperity all across a soon-to-be America, two homeless men struggling to survive meet an extraordinary woman who shows them the way to back to dignity. 
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Town and Country: Voices from the Mid-Ohio Valley
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Short Story Collection, Literary Fiction
In this collection of short stories--Town and Country: Voices from the Mid-Ohio Valley—the reader encounters ordinary people struggling with a variety of problems that threaten to change their lives: an elderly widower confronting a life of regrets, precocious children confronting separation, a middle-aged couple facing the loss of their generations-old general store, and many others. SAMPLE PDF 
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Locust Hill
Family Saga
LOCUST HILL is an adult literary fiction/family saga with romantic and mildly erotic passages that presents the courtship, marriage, and economic struggles of a young farmer, Jim Russell, and his wife Cassandra, who also serves the novel’s narrator. The novel is set in Locust Hill, a fictional West Virginia farm community in the Mid-Ohio Valley, during the mid-1960s to the present and focuses on Cassandra as she changes from a popular teenage city girl to a mature farm wife, her husband’s business partner, and the mother of their five children. Thematically, the novel affirms the value of farm life, especially in the character of the husband Jim, while dramatizing the problems that independent farmers face in the modern economy.
LOCUST HILL is an adult literary fiction/family saga with romantic and mildly erotic passages that presents the courtship, marriage, and economic struggles of a young farmer, Jim Russell, and his wife Cassandra, who also serves the novel’s narrator. The novel is set in Locust Hill, a fictional West Virginia farm community in the Mid-Ohio Valley, during the mid-1960s to the present and focuses on Cassandra as she changes from a popular teenage city girl to a mature farm wife, her husband’s business partner, and the mother of their five children. Thematically, the novel affirms the value of farm life, especially in the character of the husband Jim, while dramatizing the problems that independent farmers face in the modern economy.
