Dr. Jesse Graves has been honored for his first poetry collection.
JOHNSON CITY - Dr. Jesse Graves, an assistant professor in East Tennessee State University's department of literature and language, has been named the recipient of the Appalachian Writers Association book of the year award in poetry for his first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, published by Texas Review Press in 2011. The award will be presented at the Southern Appalachian Culture Festival at North Carolina's Gardner-Webb University.
Graves also recently won the Weatherford Award for poetry presented by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. In addition, his book has been nominated for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from the Claremont Graduate University in California.
Among his upcoming appearances, Graves will give the Henrietta Jenkins Annual Poetry Reading as part of Carson-Newman College's homecoming on Oct. 12, and he will give a lecture on Appalachian Poetry at the Emory and Henry College Literary Festival, also in October.
Next February, he will lead the poetry workshops at Walters State's Mildred Haun Festival, and in March, he will be the featured poet at the Eureka (Ill.) College Literary Festival.
Graves, the recipient of the 2012 New Faculty Award from the ETSU College of Arts and Sciences, recently published an essay, "A Blind Work of Nature: The Ethics of Representing Beauty," in James Agee at 100: Centennial Essays, edited by Michael Lofaro and published by the University of Tennessee Press. In addition, he is co-editor with William Wright and Paul Ruffin of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia, and, last summer, he taught a week-long poetry seminar at the Appalachian Writers' Workshop in Hindman, Ky.
Graves' poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, The Texas Review and Still: The Journal, among other periodicals.
For further information, contact Graves at (423) 439-6674 or gravesj@etsu.edu.
