Patrick Parr

Patrick Parr's first book was The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, a 2019 Washington State Book Award finalist. The book was the culmination of five years of research, which included more than a dozen interviews with friends who'd known King during his years at Crozer Theological Seminary (1948-1951). For his second book, Parr used newspaper archives and completed interviews with over twenty Notre Dame graduates to write One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation. Parr also incorporated into the story never-before-published letters from festival authors Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five), Wright Morris (The Field of Vision) and Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead). The book also depicts the last week of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, and Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency. Parr's third book is Malcolm Before X, to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in November 2024. Other work has appeared in The Atlantic, American History Magazine, Politico, History Today, The American Prospect, The New York Daily News and The Boston Globe. In 2014 he was awarded an Artist Trust Fellowship for his literary career. He lives with his wife near Tokyo and teaches writing at Lakeland University Japan.