Keija Parssinen is the author of The Ruins of Us, which earned a Michener Copernicus award and was named a Best Book of the Mid-East Region by Turkey's Today's Zaman newspaper; and The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, which won an Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Kansas City Star. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in World Literature Today, The Arkansas International, Salon, Slice, New Delta Review, The Brooklyn Quarterly, the Lonely Planet travel writing anthologies, and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, Playa Summer Lake, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote fellow, she is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Tulsa and directs the Pan-European M.F.A. program out of Cedar Crest College.
At MacDowell, she completed several sections of a long prose poem that will appear in her third novel, I Sing of You, which explores the American-Saudi partnership through the eyes of Saudi and American employees of Aramco, the oil giant. Additionally, she wrote several poems and an op-ed about the ethics of Americans working for Aramco, which will appear in Slate in early 2019.
