Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1951 to Curtis Bill Pepper, a war correspondent and the head of the Rome bureau for Newsweek magazine, and the sculptor Beverly Stoll Pepper. She was raised in Rome, Italy. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, but was expelled for participating in student protests. She completed her undergraduate work as a film major at New York University, and became interested in poetry during that time.

Graham has been a longtime faculty position at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and now has an appointment at Harvard University, where she occupies a seat previously held by the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including her most recent, Sea Change (Ecco, 2008). She has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. She is widely anthologized and her poetry is the subject of many essays, including Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry; Edited by Thomas Gardner (2005). Graham's many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.