Dustin Parsons teaches at the University of Mississippi. Awards for his writing include an Ohio Arts Grant and a New York Fine Arts grant for creative nonfiction, an American Literary Review prize for fiction, and a Laurel Review prize for fiction. In Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood & Work with Figures & Graphs (University of Georgia Press) “graphic” essays play with the conventions of telling a life story and with how illustration and text work together in print. Diagrams were an important part of Dustin Parsons’s childhood. Parsons’s father was an oilfield mechanic, and in his spare time he was also a woodworker, an automotive mechanic, a welder, and an artist. His shop had countless manuals with “exploded view” parts directories that the young Parsons flipped through constantly. In these essays, Parsons uses the same approach to understanding his father as he navigates the world of raising two young biracial boys.
