Writing professor Paul Graham carries a notebook with him everywhere he goes, so he can jot down ideas for his writing.  The results have been fruitful; since graduating from the MFA Program at the University of Michigan in 2001, he has completed a manuscript for a novel, A Trained Voice, that won the 2005 Dana Literary Award for the Novel. He is also working on a story collection called On the Funeral Trail, the title story of which was published in American Literary Review in 2004.

Graham graduated with highest honors from St. Lawrence in 1999, as an English and government major. As to where to go next, it was no contest.  He is a faculty member in English at his alma mater because, he states simply, “I love literature and writing.”

As a scholar, he’s interested in writing on elements of the writing craft, and also the hybridism between fiction and creative nonfiction forms. “I write frequently about people who find their lives, inexplicably, on some brink or edge they had not foreseen, usually with sad consequences,” he says. “I'm interested in beauty and purpose as redemptive power, even if such power is not easily found, and rarely in the quantities my characters need.”

Graham teaches in the First-Year Program, as well as courses on the history of the personal essay, later American literature and expository writing, he says he hopes to be teaching techniques of fiction and creative non-fiction “until I die.  I like talking with students about what literary fiction does and how it does it,” he says.

Graham’s credits his liberal arts education for helping him in his endeavors as an author. “To be a writer you have to be interested in everything, willing to investigate all kinds of subjects,” he points out. “Liberal arts institutions like St. Lawrence are inspiring because they make you do that.”