Kim Parko, MFA

Kim Parko is a mother-scholar and transdisciplinary artist practicing creation-research in the liminal hedges. She is a PhD candidate in the Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership program at Southwestern College. Immersing in philosophies and practices of epistemic justice, Open Pedagogy, and earth design, her creation-research praxis is situated in/with/through a nearby arroyo (a dry watercourse that temporarily or seasonally fills and flows after sufficient rain). From thinking through the multiliteracies of earth as the earth imagines through her, she creates living, multimodal curriculums. She is a recipient of two Nyswander-Blanchard Pre-Dissertation Doctoral Fellowships and an AIHEC 2025/26 Open Educational Resource (OER) creation grant and is excited to share her graphic narratives curriculum with other colleges in open education systems. She is the author of two hybrid books, The Grotesque Child (Co-winner 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Prize) and Cure All (Caketrain Press, 2010). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review (2018 Poetry Prize), Black Warrior Review, The Brooklyn Review, Diagram, Salt Hill, Poetry, Best Small Fictions 2023, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She is a full professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts where she teaches creative writing and graphic narrative courses. She is from European immigrant and settler ancestry. Two if her ancestral villages are Cloyne, County Cork Ireland and Zákopčie in the Carpathian Mountains of what is now Slovakia.