Jorie Graham


Jorie Graham is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

Books and awards

Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including notable volumes like The End of Beauty, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, and P L A C E. She has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language and The Best American Poetry 1990. She is widely anthologized and her poetry is the subject of many essays, including Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry. The Poetry Foundation considers Graham's third book, The End of Beauty, to have been a "watershed" book in which Graham first used the longer verse line for which she is best known. Graham's many honors include a Whiting Award, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Whiting Award. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her collection of poetry P L A C E won the 2012 Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, becoming the first American woman ever to win one of the UK's most prestigious poetry accolades. P L A C E was also shortlisted for the 2012 T S Eliot Prize. In 2013, Graham became only the third American to win the International Nonino Prize. In 2015, From the New World: Selected Poems 1976-2014—a collection from all prior eleven volumes plus new work—was published by HarperCollins/Ecco Press. In 2016 From the New World won the LA Times Book Award for poetry.
In 2017, Graham received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, recipients are nominated and elected by a majority vote of the Academy's Board of Chancellors. She won the 2018 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Fast.
About Jorie Graham, Academy of American Poets Chancellor Claudia Rankine said: "Jorie Graham's masterful poems traverse almost four decades of inquiry into what it means to be in relation. Her work pulls forward our mythical, historical, environmental, and personal narratives in order to inhabit our most ordinary and collective experiences. Hers is the patience of the return; repetition in her work unearths the nuances of fundamental desires to live, to love, to be. Clear-eyed and with a scope that encompasses what is both known and unknown, her fifteen collections have built towards a brilliant insistence on presence."
She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003, and she currently sits on the contributing editorial board to the literary journal Conjunctions.

Life

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950 to Curtis Bill Pepper, a war correspondent and the head of the Rome bureau for Newsweek magazine, and the sculptor Beverly Stoll Pepper. She and her brother John Randolph Pepper were raised in Rome, Italy. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, but was expelled for participating in student protests. She completed her undergraduate work as a film major at New York University, and became interested in poetry during that time.. After working as a secretary, she later went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts from the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Graham has held a longtime faculty position at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has held an appointment at Harvard University since 1999. Graham replaced Nobel Laureate and poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston professor in Harvard's Department of English and American Literature and Language. She became the first woman to be awarded this position.
Graham was married to and divorced from publishing heir William Graham, brother of Donald E. Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post. She then married the poet James Galvin in 1983 and they divorced in 1999. She married poet and painter Peter M. Sacks, a colleague at Harvard, in 2000.

Poetry competition controversy

In January 1999, she judged the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry series contest, which selected the manuscript "O Wheel" from Peter Sacks, her future husband, as the first-place winner. Graham noted that at that time she was not married to Sacks, and that while she had "felt awkward" about giving the award to her then-boyfriend, she had first cleared it with the series editor, Bin Ramke. As a result of the critical media coverage Ramke resigned from the editorship of the series. Graham subsequently announced that she would no longer serve as a judge in contests although she continued to do so after 2008. Throughout the course of the contest, Ramke had insisted that judges of the contest be kept secret, and until Foetry.com obtained the names of judges via The Open Records Act, the conflict of interest had been undisclosed. A statement now adopted in the rules of many competitions to prevent judges from selecting students is often referred to as the "Jorie Graham rule".
The Foetry site also contended that Graham, as a judge at Georgia and other contests, had awarded prizes to at least five of her former students from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, including Joshua Clover, Mark Levine, and Geoffrey Nutter. Graham's reply to this was that over years of teaching she has had over 1400 students, many of whom went on to continue writing poetry, that no rules had prohibited her from awarding prizes to former students, and that in each case she claims to have selected the strongest work.

Poetry collections