September 26, 2012 Johnson City poet Jesse Graves continues to rack up honors for his first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Last week, Graves won the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award. Graves will receive the award at the Southern Appalachian Culture Festival at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina.
Published by Texas Review Press, Landscape also won the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry, sponsored by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association, and it earned a nomination for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. Author Ron Rash has described this collection as “more than an extraordinary first book. These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of America’s finest young poets.”
An assistant professor of English at Johnson City’s East Tennessee State University, Graves won a 2012 New Faculty Award from ETSU’s College of Arts & Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Cornell University. His work appears in recent or forthcoming issues of Prairie Schooner, Georgia Review, Appalachian Heritage, and Connecticut Review.
To read more about Jesse Graves and the Appalachia Writers Association Book of the Year Award, click here.
To read a poem from Landscape With Blighted Pine, click here. For more updates on Tennessee authors, please visit Chapter 16’s News & Notes page, here.
Tagged: Poetry
