Brandon Graham

A transient American Southerner by birth and heritage, Brandon Graham has lived, worked, and studied in eight different states and three different countries. He worked in a used bookstore, as a commercial pressman, an adjunct professor and as a gallery director. He studied in Budapest Hungary and Dijon France, with a summer spent as a barman at Woolpack inn in Chilham, England. He eventually settled near Chicago where he studied visual and written narrative at Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts, graduating with his MFA in 2008. If one belief has latched itself securely to his core during his travels, it is that narrative is the most powerful bridge across social, intellectual, emotional and geographic distances. Brandon's first short story was published in the journal Pleiades in 1990. Since then he has written for performance, artist's books, book reviews, web content and many many zines. He has continued to publish poems and prose in literary journals, including the recent story Razed published in the experimental journal Little Bang. His books are included in several dozen special collections libraries throughout the United States including Yale, UCLA, Otis College of Art and Design, Emory University, and Ringling School of Design. In the past few years his book How To Gut A Fish was reviewed in The Blue Notebook, an art journal produced in London, England; and two of his visual books received awards at the International Book Arts Exhibition in Seoul South Korea. His mail art piece Eat More Books was made a part of the permanent collection at the Tokyo Museum of Communications. Good For Nothing is his Debut novel. Brandon continues to make art and write in Illinois where he lives with his lovely wife and two mostly sweet children, surrounded by a remarkable gang of friends and neighbors.