William Graham:  

Hello to anyone curious enough to visit this page. You may have known me as William (Bill) Graham at North Shore, but once I hit college I switched to my middle name, and I've been Philip Graham ever since (and now much longer than I was ever Bill). At Sarah Lawrence College I met my future wife, Alma, and we've been happily together since. We have two amazing children--Nathaniel and Hannah. Alma and I both taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (she was in the Anthropology Department, I was in Creative Writing/English) for over thirty years. I also served for ten years as a core faculty member of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program in Writing. I think there must have been some pent-up energy inside me while in high school, because soon after graduating from North Shore I took some turns through the world and tried some odd jobs, both during and after my college years. I was a carpenter, house builder, NYC taxi cab driver, crew member on a staysail schooner, bartender, Santa Claus (for Saks Fifth Avenue), you name it, and I hitch-hiked across the U.S. three times, canoed 400 miles on the Yukon River in Canada, traveled throughout Mexico and Japan. Throughout our married life, Alma and I have loved to travel, and we've always brought along our children, to give them the opportunity to see as much of the world as possible. Since 1979, off and on, I've also lived in small villages in Africa, where my wife has studied a small ethnic group called the Beng, in Ivory Coast. We've written two books together about our experiences, Parallel Worlds (Crown/Random House, 1993), and Braided Worlds (University of Chicago Press, 2012). There's nothing like living in a radically different culture to bend your mind more than a little bit. Certainly it's a good experience for a writer. The royalties for both Parallel Worlds and Braided Worlds, by the way, are dedicated to the Beng people. In 2020, East China Normal University Press in Shanghai will publish Chinese translations of both books. Alma is now studying Cape Verdeans, in their West African island nation and as immigrants in New England and elsewhere. As a fiction writer, I've been publishing since 1978: a collection of short fictions/prose poems, The Vanishings; two short story collections, The Art of the Knock (William Morrow, 1985), and Interior Design (Scribner, 1996); and a novel, How to Read an Unwritten Language (Scribner, 1995). These three books of fiction have recently been reprinted as e-books as part of Dzanc Books' Contemporary Literature reprint series. I've published my fiction in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, North American Review and elsewhere, and my work has been reprinted in England, Germany, the Netherlands and India....Expand for more