Who is Jorie Graham?
Jorie Graham is an American poet termed as “one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation” by the Poetry Foundation. She has authored numerous collections of poetry, such as Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Jorie was the first woman to be appointed as Boylston Professor at Harvard replacing poet Seamus Heaney. She was also chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
How Old is Jorie Graham?
Graham is 69 years old as of 2019. She was born on May 9, 1950, in New York City.
Jorie Graham Parents
Graham was born to Curtis Bill Pepper, a war correspondent and the head of the Rome bureau for Newsweek magazine, and the sculptor Beverly Stoll Pepper.
Jorie Graham Mother’s Death
Jorie announced Beverly Pepper’s death on 5th February 2020. Her mother died at her Todi home at the age of 97.

Jorie Graham Siblings
Jorie has a younger brother John Randolph Pepper who is a photographer and theatre director. Together, they were raised in Rome, Italy.
Jorie Graham Education
Graham studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. She was later expelled for participating in student protests. She later completed her undergraduate work as a film major at New York University and became interested in poetry during that time. After she worked 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.
She has also held a longtime faculty position at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1999, she has held an appointment at Harvard University.
Jorie Graham Husband
Jorie has been married thrice. She was first married to publishing heir William Graham, brother of Donald E. Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post. She later got married to James Galvin a poet in 1983 and they divorced in 1999.
In 2000, she got married to poet and painter Peter M. Sacks. Sacks is also a colleague at Harvard.
Jorie Graham Children
The poet has one child, Emily Galvin a result of her second marriage to James Galvin.
Jorie Graham Poetry
- Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts.
- Erosion
- The End of Beauty
- Region of Unlikeness
- Materialism
- The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994
- The Errancy
- Photographs and Poems
- Swarm
- Never
- Overlord
- Sea Change
- P L A C E
- From The New World: Poems 1976-2014
- Fast