James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He has written for Slate, The Boston Globe and Arthur magazine. He was a staff writer at The Boston Phoenix. In 2017–18 Parker was the Institute of Liberal Arts journalism fellow at Boston College. Since 2011, he has been running the Black Seed Writers Group, a weekly writing workshop for homeless, transitional, and recently housed writers, and editing The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston. Parker's first book, "Turned On," a biography of the punk-rock performer Henry Rollins, was published in 1998.