Jorie Graham (; born May 9, 1950) is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." Graham's many honors include a Whiting Award (1985), 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 Los Angeles Times Book Prize 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 15 collections have built towards a brilliant insistence on presence."
Personal life
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, 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 M. 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 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 (including the University of Georgia Contest) 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.
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!1991
|Region of Unlikeness
|Los Angeles Times Book Prize
|Poetry
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!1994
|Materialism: Poems
|Los Angeles Times Book Prize
|Poetry
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! rowspan="2" |1996
| rowspan="2" |The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994
|Los Angeles Times Book Prize
|Poetry
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|Pulitzer Prize
|Poetry
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!2008
|Sea Change: Poems
|Los Angeles Times Book Prize
|Poetry
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! rowspan="2" |2012
| rowspan="2" |P L A C E
|Forward Prizes for Poetry
|Collection
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|T. S. Eliot Prize
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!2012
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|Neustadt International Prize for Literature
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!2015
|From the New World: Poems 1976–2014
|Los Angeles Times Book Prize
|Poetry
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!2017
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|Wallace Stevens Award
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!rowspan="2"|2024
|rowspan="2"|To 2040
|Pulitzer Prize
|Poetry
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|Griffin Poetry Prize
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Publications
Poetry
;Collections
;Anthologies (edited)
;List of poems
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!width=25%|Title
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|I catch sight of the now
|2021
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|I
|2021
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Essays and other contributions
- Contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East and West (Gingko Library, 2019).
Critical studies and reviews of Graham's work
- Helen Vendler. The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995)
- Thomas Gardner, Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry (1999)
- Daniel McGuiness, "Jorie Graham in Stitches" and "The Long Line in Jorie Graham and Charles Wright," in Holding Patterns: Temporary Poetics in Contemporary Poetry, State University of New York Press, Albany NY (2001)
- Catherine Karaguezian, No Image There and the Gaze Remains: The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham (2005)
- Thomas Gardner (ed.), Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry (2005)
- N. S. Boone, Understanding Jorie Graham (2025)
References
External links
- Profile and poems at Poetry Foundation
- Profile and poems written and audio at Poets.org
- Profile at The Whiting Awards
- Documents obtained by Foetry.com regarding the Graham/Sacks/Ramke collusion in pdf format
- Graham reading at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 20, 1999. Video (49 mins)
- "Rhyme & Unreason" from the May 20, 2005 cover story in the Chronicle of Higher Education
- An interview with Jorie Graham, phillyBurbs.com, April 2008
- Jorie Graham Resists Classic Pleasures Like Closure, a Concept Anathema to the Poet and Her Country