"[1] She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position.

[1] She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

[6] Given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, recipients are nominated and elected by a majority vote of the Academy's Board of Chancellors.

Her work pulls forward our mythical, historical, environmental, and personal narratives in order to inhabit our most ordinary and collective experiences.

Hers is the patience of the return; repetition in her work unearths the nuances of fundamental desires to live, to love, to be.

Graham replaced Nobel Laureate and poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston professor in Harvard's Department of English and American Literature and Language.

[9] In January 1999, she judged the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry series contest, which selected the manuscript "O Wheel" from Peter M. Sacks, her future husband, as the first-place winner.

Graham noted that at that time she was not married to Sacks, and that while she had "felt awkward" about giving the award to her then-boyfriend, she had first cleared it with the series editor, Bin Ramke.

[13][15][16] The Foetry site also contended that Graham, as a judge at Georgia and other contests, had awarded prizes to at least five of her former students from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, including Joshua Clover, Mark Levine, and Geoffrey Nutter.