Philip Graham is an American novelist, short story writer, creative non-fiction author, memoirist, political satirist, professor, and editor. He is one of the founders, and the current editor-at-large, of the literary/arts journal, Ninth Letter, which won the MLA’s Best New Literary Journal Award in 2005. He is a professor emeritus in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received three campus-wide teaching awards. He has also taught in the low-residency M.F.A. program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Additionally, he 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 from The Missouri Review, as well as fellowship residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo artists' colony.
Graham was born in Brooklyn, New York and he received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1973, where he studied with Grace Paley, and received an M.A. from City College/City University of New York in 1976, where he studied with Donald Barthelme and Frederic Tuten.
Graham is the author of seven books. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Things (U.K.), and In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland (edited by Becky Bradway). His dispatches from Lisbon appeared regularly on the website of McSweeney’s. He has written over 30 book reviews on contemporary fiction and non-fiction for the Chicago Tribune and The New Leader.
