Rate My Professor Kathleen Graber

Kathleen Graber is a professor in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, specializing in creative writing and poetry. She joined VCU in 2008 as an associate professor and was promoted to full professor. From 2014 to 2016, she directed the Master of Fine Arts program in English, and she currently serves as director of the creative writing program. Graber earned her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from New York University in 2002 and her BA in Philosophy from Hofstra University in 1982. Her courses include graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops, Form and Theory of Poetry, Diverse Voices of the New Century, Salvage as Metaphor and Method, and Introduction to the English Major. Her research interests encompass contemporary poetry, book arts, and hybrid forms.

Graber's acclaimed poetry collections are The River Twice: Poems (Princeton University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 UNT Rilke Prize; The Eternal City: Poems (Princeton University Press, 2010), a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and William Carlos Williams Prize, and recipient of the 2011 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry; and Correspondence (Saturnalia Books, 2006). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and others, with selections in Best American Poetry 2012 and 2013, and Pushcart Anthology 2011. She has received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2012), American Academy of Arts and Letters Arts and Letters Award (2017), National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Grant (2011), VCU Eminent Scholar (2019), Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship (2008-2009), and Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University (2007-2008). Before VCU, she taught at New York University, Princeton University, Bennington College, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Graber's innovative poetry, blending epistolary and essayistic forms, meditates on impermanence, change, and human connection, contributing significantly to contemporary American poetry.