Jesse Graves grew up in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, where his ancestors settled in the 1780s. He is the author of four books of poetry, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition, and a collection of essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Graves has co-edited several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and Complete Poems of James Agee. He teaches at East Tennessee State University.

Other poems by Jesse Graves in Verse Daily:
June 8, 2021:   "Except in Memory" "My father stands by the leaning tobacco barn..."

Books by Jesse Graves:

Other poems on the web by Jesse Graves:
"Katie Myers"
"The Kingdom of the Dead"
Three poems
Four poems

Jesse Graves's Website.

About Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine:

"To the Anniversary Edition of his celebrated first collection Jesse Graves has added a dozen poems. These newcomers expand, but do not distress, the careful vision, the gaze that is steady while moving within and outside specific times and places. The individual object and the singular personality are for this poet compendia of experiences that refresh themselves as they age. One moment of the past opens to 'the brisk future / decades that awaited us still unlived.' The achievement of Tennessee Landscape ever enlarges."
—Fred Chappell