Poet Graham Foust was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Wisconsin. He earned his BA from Beloit College, MFA from George Mason University, and PhD from SUNY-Buffalo. Foust once noted that he is “generally uncomfortable with comfort in poetry,” and his work has received praise for its uncompromising, even dark, blend of humor, allusion, and metaphysical investigation. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including As in Every Deafness (2003); Leave the Room to Itself (2003), which won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize; Necessary Stranger (2007); A Mouth in California (2009); To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (2013); and Embarrassments (2021). With Samuel Frederick, Foust co-translated the German poet Ernst Meister’s In Time’s Rift (2012). Foust’s essays and writing have appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, Jacket, and TriQuarterly. He has taught at Saint Mary’s College of California and at the University of Denver.

His poems, essays, translations, and reviews have been published in numerous magazines and journals, including Poetrymagazine, Tthe Nation, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Boston Review, American Letters & Commentary, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Verse, and Fence.

Graham lives in Colorado and teaches in the English department at University of Denver.