Graham Foust (USA)
1970
Graham Foust was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. From 1988-1992, he attended Beloit College, and he later received graduate degrees from George Mason University (M.F.A., 1996) and the University at Buffalo (Ph.D., 2002). During and between his years of schooling, he was employed as a museum guard, a bartender, a ski-lift operator, a writing tutor, a public affairs specialist, a financial writer, a grant writer, and a clerk in a small bookstore.
From 2002-2005, he taught in the English Department at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. For several years of the San Francisco Bay Area, he is a professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California, where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses in literature and writing. He is currently associate professor at the University of Denver.
Foust’s first book, As in Every Deafness, was published by Flood Editions in 2003 and was followed shortly thereafter by Leave the Room to Itself, which won the 2003 Sawtooth Prize. \. His poems and essays can be found in TriQuarterly,Jacket, Verse, Practice, Fascicle, Conjunctions and other journals, and his several of poems have been translated into Dutch.
He has also translated, with Samuel Frederick, three books of poet Ernst Meister, In Times Rift (2012), Wallless Space (2014), and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (2015).
BOOKS OF POETRY
As in Every Deafness(Chicago: Flood Editions, 2003); Leave the Room to Itself (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 2003); Necessary Stranger (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2006); A Mouth In California (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2009); To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2013); Time Down to Mind (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2015); Nightingalelessness (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2018)
╬Winner of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
1995-1996
"I can see more light"
Said the soil
To the pearl to the
Witch at ground zero
Said the hole
In the city to the
Cork in the sun
Said the cop
To the fool to the
Church of your choice
"and it's the size of lightning
And the size of rice"
____
Reprinted from Washington Review (October/November 1996).
©1996 by Graham Foust.
╬Winner of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
2005-2006
the lake
tears
we should’ve been this—
I don’t hate you
broken gift
*
cue the dull
machinery—
deer
are licking at leaves, the lake
____
Reprinted from Slope, No. 21 (2004/2005). Copyright ©2005 by Graham Foust.