Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Davidson College, Alan Michael Parker is a cartoonist, novelist, poet, and professor. He has been called “a general beacon of brilliance” by Time Out, New York.
Alan Michael Parker has written four novels: Cry Uncle, Whale Man, The Committee on Town Happiness, and Christmas in July, as well as a just-published collection of flash fiction and Bingo card stories, Bingo Bango Boingo (Dzanc Books, 2025). He is also the author of nine collections of poems: Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, Elephants & Butterflies, Ten Days (with painter Herb Jackson), Long Division, The Ladder and The Age of Discovery. He served as coeditor of The Manifesto Project, Editor of The Imaginary Poets, and coeditor of three other volumes. In 2021, he judged the National Book Award in fiction; in 2024, he judged the PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. His next book, Bounce: Understanding Single-Panel Cartoons, will be published by Duke University Press in 2027.
Under the name “Ampydoo,” Alan Michael Parker has published close to 200 cartoons in journals such as Action/Spectacle, Orange Blossom Review, JMWW, The Twin Bird Review, and The Lincoln Review. He is a weekly contributor to Identity Theory, where 187 cartoons of his cartoons have appeared since 2022.
AMP’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines, and twice in The Best American Poetry annual; his prose has appeared in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.
Alan Michael Parker has received numerous awards for his writing, including a 2024 Humanities Fellowship from the NC Council on the Humanities, the 2021 Emily Clark Balch Prize in Poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review (for the best poems published in the magazine that year, chosen by the editors), the 2020 Lunate500 Prize for his story, “Unemployment Benefits,” the 2018 Joanna Catherina Scott Award for his poem, “Virtual Villanelle,” and the 2017 Brockman-Campbell Award for The Ladder (an annual prize for the best book of poetry published in the state of North Carolina); along with three Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, the 2013, 2014, and 2019 Randall Jarrell Award, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2012 North Carolina Book Award for Long Division. 
For his cartoons, AMP is a four-time nominee for “Best of the Net.” His fellowships include residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. He serves on the Steering Committee for the American Library of Paris.
At age twenty, AMP began his graduate work in creative writing at Washington University, where he studied with Donald Finkel, Howard Nemerov, and Mona Van Duyn. Continuing his graduate studies at Columbia University, where he would receive his M.F.A. in Writing, Alan Michael Parker worked with Carolyn Forché, Richard Howard, Denis Johnson, Stanley Kunitz, William Matthews, and Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky (with shorter stints with Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, and Derek Walcott). He also began his teaching career at Columbia, at age twenty-three.
Since 1998, Alan Michael Parker has taught at Davidson College, where he serves as Chair of the English Department, holds the Douglas C. Houchens Professorship in English, directs the Creative Writing Program, and is on the Digital, Film and Media and Studies faculty. Alan Michael Parker lives in Davidson, NC, with his wife, the artist Felicia van Bork.
AMP’s work may be found at www.ampydoocartoons.com, on Instagram as Ampydoo, and each Friday in Identity Theory.