Photo by Genamarie McCant for Lafayette Today
ARTIST Bio
McKenna Graf is a poet and filmmaker from New Jersey. She has attended writing workshops (Great Books Online Fiction Workshop, Kenyon Young Writers Workshop) and regularly attends open mics in order to grow and cultivate her community. She is the author of the collection, An Archive of Adolescence, in which she promotes art as a way to show growth and be used as an archive. She has done this by publishing a book each year of her college career (writing over the word limit, Mortals, Myths, and Maybes, THE DEPTHS, What's Left?). Her work in film primarily focuses on observational documentaries about family and memory. She has had two shorts accepted to two film festivals, respectively. She has worked with Women Make Movies and The Art of Movie Making Film Festival and is passionate about supporting rising artists. She has several student short films on her Vimeo and is interested in the intersection between film and poetry.
In the Spotlight
"Earnest, plainstated, even desperate, the epistolary impulse in McKenna Graf's The Depths brings us into the throes of early love in order to explicate the emotional truths of fear and hope, of longing and absence. In this state of living, what the speakers of Graf's poems seek in the other, they lack in the self, and vice versa. The search for eros leads us to many surprising vistas of the psyche and narrative turns. I am grateful for these poems and for this new voice."
Lisa Hiton on THE DEPTHS,
Author of Afterfeast