Latria Graham

“Graham is rewriting the stories of southern African Americans into the regional and national consciousness, and reclaiming her own rootedness in the American South.” –The Open Notebook

“A modern-day Zora Neale Hurston.” –Publishers Weekly

Latria Graham is an award-winning magazine feature writer from Spartanburg, South Carolina. Her 2018 essay “We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us,” offers a discussion on why Black Americans have a fraught relationship with the outdoors but still crave deep connections with the natural world. The follow-up piece “Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream” – published in 2020 – led to Graham’s forthcoming memoir Uneven Ground: A Memoir of a Family, a Land, and a Culture in Peril (Mariner, 2026).

Across her feature writing and memoir work, Graham focuses her profiles on a diverse range of individuals and her own personal experiences, writing about charged topics of race, class, and social justice. What emerges in her work are stories of a tragic American past and present, made accessible through her empathetic observations and shared vulnerability. When asked in an interview with Outside Online about her identification as a “disciple of landscapes” and the inherent spirituality of the natural world Graham elaborated: “I think of nature as my life’s church. Nature has a lot to teach us, and it shapes my worldview. Everything in nature is connected. Humans love to forget it, but we’re part of that connection. A disciple is one who is studying, constantly learning. I’ve studied the outdoors for a long time, and even though the word has been claimed by Evangelical Christians, who are mostly Republicans, I wanted to take it back. As someone who has dealt with floods, fires, and tornadoes—all of which display the power and sheer magnitude of nature—I know there’s a higher power. It’s my teacher.”

Graham is the ethical travel columnist for Afar Magazine, as well as the writer behind Garden & Gun’s “This Land” column, which documents and investigates the lesser known or rapidly disappearing aspects of the natural world in the South. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian, espnW, Southern Living, and The Atlantic. She was a recipient of of a 2025 American Mosaic Journalism Prize from the Heising-Simons Foundation.

An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in Augusta University’s English and World Languages department, she is also a Distinguished Professor of Practice at the University of Georgia’s Narrative Nonfiction MFA program housed in the Grady College of Mass Communication & Journalism.