Philip Graham is the author of a collection of prose poems, The Vanishings (Release Press, 1978), listed as one of the best small press books of the year by Library Journal ; The Art of the Knock: Stories (William Morrow, 1985), listed as one of the ten best new works of fiction of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle ; Interior Design: Stories (Scribner, 1996); and the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language (Scribner, 1995; paperback, Warner Books 1997), nominated and longlisted for an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

He is also the co-author (with Alma Gottlieb) of the memoir of Africa, Parallel Worlds (Crown/ Random House, 1993; paperback, University of Chicago Press 1994), which was the winner of the 1993 Victor Turner Prize and has been taught at over 300 colleges and universities internationally; a second volume, Braided Worlds (also co-authored with Alma Gottlieb), is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2012. His most recent book, The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon (University of Chicago Press, 2009), is an expanded edition of his dispatches from Lisbon that appeared regularly on the McSweeney’s website. The book will be published in a Portuguese translation by Editorial Presença in February of 2012.

Graham’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker, North American Review, Carolina Quarterly, Fiction, The Washington Post Magazine, Missouri Review, Western Humanities Review, Crab Orchard Review, Los Angeles Review and elsewhere, and has been reprinted or translated in England, Germany, the Netherlands and India. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and Poets & Writers Magazine.

His work has been anthologized in many collections, including The Norton Book of Ghost Stories (edited by Brad Leithauser), Turning Life into Fiction (edited by Robin Hemley), The Year’s Best in Fantasy and Horror (edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland (edited by Becky Bradway). An excerpt from the forthcoming Braided Worlds, “Mad to be Modern,” has just been published in the anthology Being There, edited by Sarah Davis and Melvin Konner, by Harvard University Press (2011).

His essays on the craft of writing have appeared in Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations (edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville), Words Overflown by Stars (edited by David Jauss), and Now Write! Nonfiction: Memoir, Journalism, and Creative Nonfiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers (edited by Sherry Ellis). His essay “The Ant in the Water Droplet” will appear in The Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, edited by Dinty W. Moore (Rose Metal Press, 2012)

Graham 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, as well as fellowship residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo artist colonies. Graham teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is a co-founder of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter (having served as the fiction editor for several years, he is currently the nonfiction editor), and is the recipient of three campus teaching awards. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing.

Graham is currently completing a novel, Invisible Country (several chapters of which have appeared in literary magazines over the past decade), a novella (inspired by his volunteer work near Ground Zero in New York), a book on the craft of writing (based on his craft lectures on fiction and non-fiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts), and an international anthology of short stories that feature dreams.