Lea Graham is a writer, editor, translator and professor who lives in Kingston, New York. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up in Northwest Arkansas and has lived in Joplin, Missouri; Perth Amboy, New Jersey; Chicago, Illinois; Worcester, Massachusetts; Santiago, Dominican Republic; San Jose, Costa Rica; Florence, Italy and Quito, Ecuador. She earned her B.A. in English from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is Associate Professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York where she has been on faculty since 2007.

She teaches both creative writing and literature courses, with a focus on contemporary poetry and theory, place studies, travel writing, music and cultural studies, and Latin American literature. Her first year seminars and special topics courses have included Myth, Play, Politics: 20th Century Poetics; Poetics & the Philosophy of Language (co-taught), Magical Realism in the Americas, Blues Poetry/Blues History (co-taught) and Birth of the Cool: Jazz & 20th Century U.S. Culture.

She has led numerous travel abroad courses and taught internationally in places such as Dublin, Ireland; Les Cayes, Haiti; Santiago de Compostela, Spain and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. She has been faculty on the Marist/Lorenzo d’ Medici campus in Florence, Italy where she taught the first year seminar, Florence by Foot, Tuscany by Train and in fall 2016 will teach All Roads (Don’t) Lead to Rome: A Study on Pilgrimage.

Graham is the author of two poetry collections, From the Hotel Vernon (Salmon Press, 2019) and Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011), and three chapbooks, Spell to Spell (above/ground Press, 2018), This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch (Apt. 9 Press, 2016) and Calendar Girls (above/ground Press, 2006).

Her poems, reviews, essays and translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies that include Dogwood, Plume, The Southern Humanities Review, The Arkansas Review, and In|Filtration: Anthology of Innovative Hudson Valley Poetics. 

Current projects include Curiosity Road, a book of travel essays, and a poetry manuscript, In Transit, which focuses on the histories of travel.