Linda Parsons
Playwright
Linda Parsons coordinates WordStream, WDVX-FM’s weekly reading series, with Stellasue Lee and is the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. As playwright-in-residence for The Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee, she has written and produced three original plays, with an adaptation produced at two regional colleges. As poet, she has contributed to The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, Shenandoah, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, among many other journals and anthologies. Parsons is the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Candescent is her fifth poetry collection (Iris Press, 2019). A fourth play is underway for The Hammer Ensemble, celebrating the Centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.
Highlights
Linda Parsons is a poet, playwright, and freelance editor. She coordinates the reading series WordStream: The Weekly Writer’s Voice, sponsored by WDVX-FM, and is the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. She serves as playwright-in-residence for The Hammer Ensemble, Flying Anvil Theatre’s social justice wing. Hammer productions include The Pall: In the Shadows of Human Trafficking (2018), Lockdown (2018), in conjunction with Tennessee Wesleyan University, and Light Years: A Journey with Alzheimer’s (2019)—all produced at Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee. A fourth Hammer play is underway, celebrating the Centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Her adaptation, Macbeth Is the New Black, co-written with Jayne Morgan, was produced at Maryville College (2014) and Western Carolina University (2015), and her play Under the Esso Moon received a staged reading in the 2017 Tennessee Stage Company’s New Play Festival. Her play Decoration Day was presented as a staged reading at the 2016 Mildred Haun Conference at Walters State Community College. Her musical on the life of Albert Schweitzer with composer and lyricist John Purifoy, Lambarene, received two staged readings in 1991 at Paper Mill Playhouse, the state theatre of New Jersey.
Parsons has received two literary fellowships and an Arts Build Communities grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, among other awards, and presents poetry readings and workshops widely at conferences and locally. She has contributed poetry to The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, among many other national journals and anthologies. Her fifth poetry collection is Candescent (Iris Press, 2019).
She has been active in the Knoxville, Tennessee, writing community for nearly forty years and recently retired after almost thirty years as an editor at the University of Tennessee. She has served on the board of Flying Anvil Theatre since 2014.