Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950. She was raised in Rome and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Runaway (2020), and most recently [To] the Last [Be] Human (2022).