Roy Neil Graves (b. 1939)

Biography

Roy Neil Graves was born in the West Tennessee town of Medina on February 2, 1939. He attended Union College in nearby Jackson, Tennessee, but transferred to Princeton after two years where he received his bachelor's degree in English in 1961. From there he got married and enrolled in the University of Virginia in Lynchburg, and eventually received his doctorate in 1971 from the University of Mississippi. Currently, Graves teaches at the University of Tennessee at Martin. In 1987, he was awarded the second Mid-South Chapbook Competition for his volume of poetry, Somewhere on the Interstate.

Bibliography

Non-Fiction

• Emily Dickinson and Imagism (Master's thesis, Duke University, 1964)
• Hugh John Massey of the Royal Hall: The Lost Master Poet of Fourteenth-Century England and the Lost Runes (1977)
• Shakespeare's Lost Sonnets: The 154 Runic Poems (1979)

Poetry

• Medina and Other Poems (1976)
• Out of Tennessee: Poems, with an Introduction (Doctoral dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1977)
• Somewhere on the Interstate (1987)
• Always at Home Here: Poems and Insights from Six Tennessee Poets (with Ernest Lee, Marilou Awiakta, Richard Jackson, Marilyn Kallet, Jeff Daniel Marion, and Judith Odom; 1996)

Sources and Links

• Biographical sketch and poems
• Phyllis Tickle and Alice Swanson, eds. Homeworks: A Book of Tennessee Writers. Knoxville: Tennessee Arts Commission and the University of Tennessee Press, 1996.

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