Jesse Graves

Jesse Graves published his first collection of poetry, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, with Texas Review Press in 2011. The book was awarded the 2012 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College, Book of the Year in Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association, and the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. His second collection of poems, Basin Ghosts, was released by Texas Review Press, and won the 2015 Weatherford Award in Poetry. His third full-length book of poems, Specter Mountain, was published by Mercer University Press. This volume is an innovative collaboration on the haunted landscapes of the imagination with award-winning poet William Wright. Mercer University Press also published his fourth volume of poems, Merciful Days, in 2020, and his first collection of literary essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place, in 2021. Graves received the Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, and the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 2015, he was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. He is also co-editor for four volumes of scholarship: Jeff Daniel Marion: Poet on the Holston (University of Tennessee Press, 2016); Conversations with Robert Morgan (University Press of Mississippi, 2019); Robert Morgan: Essays on the Life and Work (McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2021), and The Complete Poems of James Agee (University of Tennessee Press, 2024). Graves has edited several collections of poetry and prose, including the Contemporary Appalachia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, Texas A&M UP Consortium), and Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers. Jesse Graves grew up in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, where his ancestors settled in the 1780s. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry Writing from Cornell University, and PhD in English from The University of Tennessee, and he teaches as Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at East Tennessee State University.