Author of four books of poetry, most recently, Walking Barefoot, Vicki Graham lives on a wild and scenic river in Oregon. Here, she wanders the gravel bar, gathers stones, and listens for the first spotted sandpiper in spring. And in the second growth Douglas fir forest above the river, where the flowering stalk of a twayblade rises above heart-shaped-leaves and licorice ferns cascade from moss-covered deeply fissured bark, she writes poems for the forest, for the river, and for the creatures inhabiting this wondrous place. Her poems begin with love, work through grief for a vanishing world, and find renewal.  

Graham’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Midwest Quarterly, ISLE, and Seneca Review, among other literary journals. They have also been published in several anthologies, including The Heart of All That Is and Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude, both through Holy Cow! Press, and Perfect Dragonfly: A Commonplace Book of Poems Celebrating a Decade and a Half of Printing and Publishing at Red Dragonfly Press. “Seventy Years After the Clear-cut: The Keystone,” a poem Graham wrote for the Wild Rivers Land Trust, was recently anthologized in Writing the Land:  Currents. 

Graham has been a writer in residence at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest as part of the Long-Term Ecological Reflections Project and was a writer-witness to clear cut logging at Shotpouch Creek, both of these through Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project. She also was awarded a summer-long residency at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, Washington. 

After a career as Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where she taught poetry, creative writing, and environmental studies for twenty-seven years, she now lives full time in Oregon.