Jorie Graham

Poet Class of 1990
location icon Location
Iowa City, Iowa
age iconAge
40 at time of award
area of focus iconArea of Focus

About Jorie's Work

Jorie Graham is a poet whose poems contain unpredictable juxtapositions of philosophical and demotic diction, and experiment with new stanzaic patternings.

Graham writes poetry that explores the long, meditative, quasi-visionary line of Walt Whitman and John Ashbery.  Her nine books of poetry include Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Region of Unlikeness (1991), Materialism (1994), The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), The Errancy (1997), Swarm (2000), and Never (2002).  She is also the editor of The Best American Poetry, 1990 (1991), and Earth Took of Earth (1996), an anthology of English and American poetry.

Biography

Graham was a professor at the University of Iowa and on the faculty of the Writers’ Workshop (1983-99) where she taught and directed the poetry program.  Since 1999, she has been the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.  She served as the poetry editor of Crazyhorse and, since 1990, has been the poetry editor of the Colorado Review.  She has been a contributing editor at the Boston Review, Conjunctions, and the Denver Quarterly and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (1997-2003).

Graham received a B.A. (1973) from New York University and an M.F.A (1978) from the University of Iowa.

Last updated January 1, 2005

Published on August 1, 1990

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