CLAUDIA MORENO PARSONS

I am a teacher, scholar, and writer with a wide range of interests, currently a professor of English at Oxnard College in California. After beginning my undergraduate college career as an Anthropology major, I switched my focus to do what I truly love: read books. Studying Medieval Arab and Western European literatures while earning my Master’s degree at Brooklyn College (CUNY), I then focused on North American poetics at the CUNY Graduate Center, receiving my PhD in 2010. I have been teaching composition and literature courses since 1999, when I began my graduate studies.

My first book,Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in their Recencies Series (2013) and received the 2014 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. The Collected Letters, an annotated collection of the correspondence between the poets Ed Dorn and Amiri Baraka in the early 1960s, originated as both dissertation and as a publication in the first Lost and Found series.

In addition to my research and work on the writing of Lucia Berlin, I am working on a new project now on Ed Dorn entitled "Little Lanterns: Poems in a Dark Terrain."