Poet, Pulitzer Winner Jorie Graham Named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory

Jorie Graham, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, has been named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, a professorship held most recently by poet Seamus Heany.

Currently on the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she has taught since 1983, Graham says she plans to divide her time between the two universities for the immediate future, teaching at Harvard next fall and at Iowa for the spring semester of 2000.

Graham is a graduate of New York University and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, for which she won the Pulitzer. She also has edited two poetry anthologies.

She is the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.