Cecily Parks is the author of three poetry collections, including The Seeds, which was a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award and named one of NPR's Books We Love. She is the guest editor of Best New Poets 2025 and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Nation, The New Republic, several editions of The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches in the M.F.A. Program at Texas State University and lives in Austin.
While at MacDowell in 2008, Parks completed an essay about her great-great-grandmother and also worked on new poems. During her 2011 residency, she wrote poems for a collaboration with visual artist and MacDowell Fellow Ken Buhler, titled Birdlands. In 2021, she worked on a memoir about naming and the woman she's named after. During her 2025 residency, Parks continued work on that memoir.
