“Tom Parker is simply the best partner I’ve ever had on a project. His ability to make the complex understandable is pure genius. Simply put, he’s the best.”
Gary Heil, co-author of Leadership and the Customer Revolution: The Messy, Unpredictable, and Inescapably Human Challenge of Making the Rhetoric of Change a Reality and One Size Fits One: Building Relationships One Customer and One Employee at a Time
“Tom Parker is a pleasure to work with. He is a quick study, has a great sense of humor, related exceptionally with our top executives, understood our audiences and our culture, and met our every demand and deadline. Our first real speechwriter, he really raised the bar for us.”
Sandra MacKay Miley, Former Director Marketing Communications, Adobe Systems, Inc.
“Working with Tom Parker was a pleasure. He helped me dig down, analyze, and develop my story into a bestseller. I enjoyed working with him.” Dave Winfield, baseball Hall Of Fame superstar and author of Winfield: A Player’s Life
“Working with Tom Parker on my book was great fun and a truly rewarding experience. He’s smart, sensitive, interested and has a terrific sense of humor. I’m hoping we can do another project again soon.”
Sandra Kurtzig, former CEO, ASK Computer Systems
Author of Ceo: Building a $400 Million Company from the Ground Up
“Tom has been immensely helpful to me. He identifies problems with manuscripts in a constructive fashion and makes you feel good about fixing them. He also inspires you when you get it right.”
Bill Davidow, Author of Marketing High Technology, The Virtual Corporation, and Total Customer Service, former Intel Senior VP; Principal, Mohr Davidow Ventures
“Tom Parker has an uncanny sense of how to deconstruct written work-in-progress and help us to get to what we are trying to say, even when, as writers, we don’t quite know ourselves.”
Lalita Tademy, Author of the best-selling Cane River and Red River
“It’s rare to find a wonderful writer who is also a marvelous reader and editor. Tom Parker is exactly that, and his editorial and teaching skills have midwived some of the best American fiction of the last two decades.”
Ann Packer, Author of the New York Time’s best-selling The Dive From Clausen’s Pier
“I’m so grateful to Tom Parker for his guidance in helping me shape my first novel. It’s rare for wonderful writers to be wonderful teachers but Tom Parker is that rare combination of both. His humor and his insight make him a joy to work with.”
Lolly Winston, Author of the New York Times best-selling Good Grief (Warner Books, optioned by Universal Studios) and Happiness Sold Separately
“Tom Parker is a wonderful and engaging teacher of writing. I learned a great deal from his classes and from working with him on my stories. He gave me excellent advice that helped me put together my first collection, Arranged Marriage, which went on to win an American Book Award. I encourage you to work with him.”
Chitra Divakaruni, Author of Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart and Queen of Dreams
“Tom Parker is that unusual teacher who combines perception and insight, long experience, and a compassionate desire to be constructive. I know of few other people who can do this with wit and charm…Not only can I recommend him as a writing teacher, but believe an apprenticeship is incomplete without it.”
Jim Kohlberg, Managing partner Kohlberg & Company; Board member, The New York Times; Producer of the Sundance Award-winning film Two Family House
“Writers working with Tom Parker discover that he has an intuitive sense of what makes a story sizzle and a master teacher’s capacity to render those perceptions into words.”
Kim Wolterbeek, Author of The Glass Museum
“Tom Parker has an unerring instinct for what’s working and what’s not in fiction.”
Louis B. Jones, Author of the best-selling Ordinary Money and California’s Over
“To the extent that anyone can actually ‘teach’ the art of fiction, I believe that Tom Parker does it best. In fact, I believe he does it better than anyone does anything, and that, you’ll agree, is taking in a good deal of territory.”
Bob Levy, Winner of the Nelsen Algren Prize for short fiction
“Tom Parker is a remarkable editor. He brings to each manuscript he edits a deep understanding of drama and a natural sense for teasing out meaning, always with an eye toward helping the writer achieve his or her own vision.”
Karen Bjorneby, Author of Hurricane Season
“Tom Parker’s insistence on economy of language and dramatic tension, and his unwavering commitment to each sentence moving the story forward has taught me more about writing than any program — including my MFA in Creative Writing.”
Joan Gelfand, Author of Seeking Center, and former President of the Women’s National Book Association
“Tom Parker and I have taught at writers’ conferences for many years. He’s a truly gifted teacher — knowledgeable, generous, insightful, and funny as hell.”
Ellen Sussman, Author of On A Night Like This, Dirty Words and Bad Girls