Jonathan Donald Graham is an author with a passion for the writing of lyric poetry and prose.  Everything Waits, his first collection of verse, highlights the natural world as seen through the eyes of an Emergency Physician. From this collection, the poem Diminutive Bird was one of three winners in Ohio’s Eco-Poetry contest and will be published in Open Earth Foundation’s Open Earth III 2023. 

His second production, The Sky Was Always Underground, is a lyric hybrid of poetry and short prose. This work chronicles the author’s early life in an ethnic enclave of immigrant Slovak coal miners in the Appalachian foothills of Southeastern Ohio after a devastating explosion at Willow Grove Mine took the lives of 72 neighbors, family and friends. From this collection, the poem Appalachia Healing was chosen to appear in Open Earth III 2023.

Graham, drafted into the military during the Vietnam War, served first as a hospital corpsman/medic, then later in aviation. He went on to study poetry writing under Poet Laureate James Dickey, and medicine, becoming an Emergency Physician who worked for 30 years in the ER at Mercy Medical Center in Canton, Ohio. Jon resides with Martha on Lone Willow Farm in the Appalachian foothills of East Central Onio.  You may visit him on Facebook.