Philip Graham

Instructor

Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collections The Art of the Knock (William Morrow) and Interior Design (Scribner), and the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language (Scribner).  He is also the co-author (with his wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb) of two memoirs of Africa, Parallel Worlds (Crown/Random House) and, most recently, Braided Worlds (University of Chicago Press).  His memoir of living for a year in Portugal, The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon (University of Chicago Press), has been translated into Portuguese as Do Lado de Ca do Mar (Editorial Presença). Graham’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post Magazine, North American Review, Paris Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and elsewhere.  He has been awarded 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.  He teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is a co-founder and the current nonfiction editor of the literary/arts magazine Ninth Letter, and is the recipient of three campus teaching awards.  He also teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing.