Amy Parker is a writer of speculative fiction, a collector of what-if's, a comparatist who loves the way the arts intersect, borrow from one another, and sometimes all talk at once. Enduringly obsessed with a 19th century novel about whaling, a lover of medical history (especially obstetrics), and currently devouring first wave feminist essays and 1970's queer sci-fi, receiving a belated education in hip-hop, a frustrated ballerina and Bronte enthusiast, she looks forward to encountering others' writerly idiosyncrasies and obsessions wherever they arise. She is a graduate of the Clarion Sci-Fi and Fantasy Workshop and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an erstwhile Zen monk, and after ten years in the Midwest, a perplexed former Californian. Her debut collection, Beasts and Children, explores the intersecting fates of women, children, and animals through a fabulist and lyrical lens. When she’s not meditating on metafictionality or rereading chapter 94 of Moby Dick, Amy teaches writing at the University of Iowa