Parks was born in New Jersey but grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he attended Ridgefield High School. He first started writing professionally for his hometown newspaper, The Ridgefield Press, at age 14, covering high school sports. He attended Dartmouth College, founding his own newspaper, The Sports Weekly (now defunct) and singing with the Dodecaphonics, a co-ed a cappella group. While still a student, he worked as a stringer for The New York Times and as an intern for The Boston Globe. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth in 1996, he interned at The Washington Post, and was eventually hired full-time by the paper, which assigned him to a bureau in Manassas, Virginia. In 1998, he moved to The Star-Ledger and began working as a sports features writer and, later, a news feature writer. In 2007, Crossroads, his four-part series on the 1967 Newark riots won the New Jersey Press Association's top prize for enterprise reporting. He now lives in Virginia with his wife and two small children.