Jorie Graham - Controversy

Controversy

Her relationship to Sacks was briefly a source of controversy. In January 1999, she judged the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry series contest, which selected the manuscript "O Wheel" from Peter Sacks as the first place winner. Graham noted that, at the time she and Ramke awarded the prize, she had not yet married Sacks, and that while she had "felt awkward" about the award, she had first cleared it with the series editor, Bin Ramke, who made the actual award. As a result of the critical coverage from Foetry.com and elsewhere, Ramke resigned from the editorship of the series. Graham subsequently announced that she would no longer serve as a judge in contests, although she continued to do so through 2008. 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. The University of Georgia Press now discloses the names of its poetry judges, who "are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds.". 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. Graham's reply to this was that over years of teaching she has had over 1400 students, many of whom went on to continue writing poetry, that no rules had prohibited her from awarding prizes to former students, and that in each case she claims to have selected the strongest work.