ETSU’s Dr. Jesse Graves wins Appalachian Writers Association book of the year

Dr. Jesse Graves, an assistant professor in East Tennessee State University’s Department of Literature and Language, has been named the recipient of the Appalachian Writers Association book of the year award in poetry for his first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, published by Texas Review Press in 2011.

The award will be presented at the Southern Appalachian Culture Festival at North Carolina’s Gardner-Webb University.

Graves also recently won the Weatherford Award for poetry presented by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association.

His book has been nominated for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from the Claremont Graduate University in California.

Among his upcoming appearances, Graves will give the Henrietta Jenkins Annual Poetry Reading as part of Carson-Newman College’s homecoming on Oct. 12, and he will give a lecture on Appalachian Poetry at the Emory and Henry College Literary Festival, also in October.

Next February, he will lead the poetry workshops at Walters State’s Mildred Haun Festival, and in March, he will be the featured poet at the Eureka (Ill.) College Literary Festival.

Graves was the recipient of the 2012 New Faculty Award from the ETSU College of Arts and Sciences, and recently published an essay, “A Blind Work of Nature: The Ethics of Representing Beauty,” in James Agee at 100: Centennial Essays. He is co-editor with William Wright and Paul Ruffin of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia, and, last summer, he taught a week-long poetry seminar at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop in Hindman, Ky.