Draft:Jonathan Graham

Jonathan Donald Graham (born June 5, 1947) is an American writer, poet, and physician.

Career
Graham was born along the Ohio River in Martins Ferry on June 5, 1947. He grew up near Wheeling Steel in rural Ohio in a small ethnic enclave of immigrant Czechoslovakian coal-miners. After attending Mount Union College, where he played football, Graham was drafted into the military, choosing to serve six years in the US Navy: first as a hospital corpsman/medic, then later was commissioned in the Navy’s Aerospace program, completing flight training, as well as advanced study in altitude physiology and survival techniques.

After fulfilling his military obligation, Graham returned to school, working nights and weekends as a clinical chemist while studying poetry writing under Poet Laureate James Dickey, and medicine, becoming an emergency physician who practiced for 30 years at Mercy Medical Center in Canton, Ohio. Jon resides on Lone Willow Farm in East Central Ohio. After a 40-year hiatus, Graham has returned to writing.

Authorship
Graham's work has been published in I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices and by the Wick Poetry Center. It has also been performed on NPR's Ideastream and through the Ohio Poetry Association. His poetry collection Everything Waits (Cornerstone Press, Univ of Wisconsin -- Stevens Point) was published in September 2023, and was described by the publisher as highlighting "the natural world, the rugged beauty and kinship with a coal-mining region in Appalachia, the loud thunder when relatives and townspeople die in a devastating mine explosion – the yin and yang of love and death, remorse and longing.” His poem "''Scream red. . . for a secret passage to air" appeared in a hybrid collection, The Sky Was Always Underground: A Lyric Memoir of Appalachia'' (Sunbury Press) in January 2024, describing the aftermath of a gaseous explosion that claimed the lives of 72 coal miners, devastating a community in southeastern Ohio for decades."