Jorie Graham - Life

Life

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950 to Curtis Bill Pepper, a war correspondent and the head of the Rome bureau for Newsweek magazine, and the sculptor Beverly Stoll Pepper (born December 20, 1924, Brooklyn, New York). She was raised in Rome, Italy. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, but was expelled for participating in student protests. She completed her undergraduate work as a film major at New York University, and became interested in poetry during that time. (She claims that her interest was sparked while walking past M.L. Rosenthal's classroom and overhearing the last couplet of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" ). After working as a secretary, she later went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts from the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Graham has held a longtime faculty position at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has held an appointment at Harvard University since 1999. Graham replaced Nobel Laureate and poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston professor in Harvard's Department of English and American Literature and Language. She became the first woman to be awarded this position.

Graham was married to and divorced from publishing heir William Graham, brother of Donald E. Graham, now publisher of the Washington Post. She then married the poet James Galvin in 1983 and they divorced in 1999. She married poet Peter M. Sacks, a colleague at Harvard, in 2000.