 Parkison was born in Oklahoma and earned her Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English Language and Literature/Letters from Oklahoma State University in 2000, where she was Art Editor and Fiction Editor of "Papyrus", the undergraduate literary magazine.She earned her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2002, and taught there as a lecturer of Creative Writing from September 2002 to May 2004.Parkison worked as an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she taught Creative Writing, including fiction, poetry, and screenwriting.