His first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, won the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from the Appalachian Studies Association, as well as a Book of the Year Award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association. His second collection of poems, Basin Ghosts, won the 2014 Weatherford Award in Poetry. Graves was awarded the 2014 Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, and the 2015 James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.