Department of Literature and Language

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Jesse Graves

Jesse Graves, PhD

Poet in Residence | Professor, English

Jesse Graves began teaching at ETSU in 2009, after completing a PhD at The University of Tennessee. He teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in creative writing, and broadly in the study of poetry. Dr. Graves is the author of three poetry collections, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine (Texas Review Press, 2011), Basin Ghosts (Texas Review Press, 2014), and Specter Mountain, co-authored with William Wright, and forthcoming from Mercer University Press in 2018. Dr. Graves has co-edited several volumes of poetry and scholarship, including three volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology (Contemporary Appalachia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, (Texas Review Press), Jeff Daniel Marion: Poet on the Holston (University of Tennessee Press, 2016), and The Complete Poems of James Agee (University of Tennessee Press, 2018). Dr. Graves received the 2014 Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, and the 2015 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.