David M. Parsons

Parsons holds a BBA from Texas State University and an MA from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program where he studied poetry and literature with Edward Hirsch, Stanley Plumly, Richard Howard, Robert Pinsky and Howard Moss. Parsons is a professor at Lone Star College-Montgomery where he teaches English and Creative Writing. He is a founder and program director of Writers in Performance, a monthly reading series in partnership with the non-profit Montgomery County Literary Arts Council which he founded and co-directs. The Commissioners Court of Montgomery County, Texas, named him County Poet Laureate in 2005 for a five-year term. In 2013, the City of Conroe, Texas, recognized Parsons with a bronze bust in the town’s Founders Plaza. In 2019, his poem, “The Texian,” was installed in bronze at Lone Star Monument & Historical Flag Park in Conroe, Texas. Every year since 1994 Parsons has hosted birthday celebrations in Conroe, Texas, for the poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman featuring presentations from scholars and readings by regional and nationally recognized poets. Scholar Michael Robertson notes the yearly Whitman gathering in his work Worshiping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton University Press). Parsons served in the United States Marine Corps both active duty and Reserve for eight years, becoming a Squad Leader and Recon Boat Team Leader. He developed a creative writing course specifically for veterans and their families at Lone Star College-Montgomery in 2015. Charles Ealy, writing in the Austin American Statesman, says of the collection Reaching for Longer Water "David M. Parsons.. Takes us back to the Austin of his youth in his latest collection of verse. But he writes about his youth with a striking clarity that veers far from sentimentality." Poet Ange Mlinko writes of Parsons and his work, “It is deeply informed by English and American literature. There is no artificial barrier between art and life, love and intellect. The Renaissance man was once a courtly ideal; Parsons shows that it is a democratic ideal too—warm-blooded, muscular, as companionable on the page as in the flesh.” Parsons was elected to membership in the Texas Institute of Letters in 2009.

• Name — David M. Parsons • Birth Name — David Mercier Parsons • Born — 16 April 1943 • Birthplace — Villa Rica, Georgia, U.S. • Occupation — Author and Educator • Education — Texas State University, University of Houston • Known for — Poet Laureate of Texas, 2011 • Notable Works — Feathering Deep, Reaching for Longer Water • Website — http: www.daveparsonspoetry.com/

• Editing Sky, (Texas Review Press, 1999.) • Color of Mourning, (Texas Review Press, 2005.) • Feathering Deep, (Texas Review Press, 2012) • David M. Parsons New & Selected Poems, (Texas Christian University Press, 2012.) • Reaching for Longer Water, (Texas Review Press, 2015.) • Far Out: Poems 978-0-87565-907-7}}}of the 60’s, (co-edited with Wendy Barker), (Wings Press, 2016.) • Austin Relativity:Coming of Age in the '60s,(TCU Press,2025. }