UIUC Creative Writing

Philip Graham is the author of a collection of prose poems,The Vanishings (Release Press, 1978), listed as one of the best small press books of the year by Library Journal; The Art of the Knock: Stories (William Morrow, 1985), listed as one of the ten best new works of fiction of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle; Interior Design: Stories (Scribner, 1996); and the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language (Scribner, 1995; paperback, Warner Books 1997), nominated for an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He is also the co-author (with Alma Gottlieb) of the memoir of Africa, Parallel Worlds (Crown/ Random House, 1993; paperback, University of Chicago Press 1994), which was the winner of the 1993 Victor Turner Prize and has been taught at over 200 colleges and universities internationally; a second volume, Braided Worlds, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2010.

Graham’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker, North American Review, Carolina Quarterly, Fiction, The Washington Post Magazine, Missouri Review, Western Humanities Review, Crab Orchard Review, Los Angeles Review and elsewhere, and has been reprinted or translated in England, Germany, the Netherlands and India. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and Poets & Writers Magazine. His dispatches from Lisbon, which appear regularly on the McSweeney’s website, are forthcoming in book form as The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon, by the University of Chicago Press in 2009.

His work has been anthologized in many collections, including The Norton Book of Ghost Stories (edited by Brad Leithauser), Turning Life into Fiction (edited by Robin Hemley), The Year’s Best in Fantasy and Horror (edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland (edited by Becky Bradway). His essays on the craft of writing have appeared or will soon appear in Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations (edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville), Words Overflown by Stars (edited by David Jauss), and Now Write!: Nonfiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers (edited by Sherry Ellis).

Graham is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Illinois Arts Council grants, and the William Peden Prize in Fiction, as well as fellowship residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo artist colonies. Graham is a co-founder and the current fiction editor of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter, and he is the recipient of three University of Illinois campus teaching awards.