About Jeffrey Skinner
Hello, thanks for stopping by.
I’m a poet and writer. And, sometimes, half-assed playwright.
My poetry was awarded a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. My project involved a conflation of contemporary physics, poetry, and theology. I then served as the June, 2015 Artist in Residence at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland.
In 2015 I was awarded one of eight American Academy of Arts & Letters Awards, for exceptional accomplishment in writing.
Over the years my poems and other writings have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, FENCE, Bomb, and The Georgia, Iowa, and Paris Reviews.
My full collections of poems:
Sober Ghost, available from C&R Press in April, 2024.
Chance Divine, winner of the Field Poetry Award, published February, 2017.
Glaciology, chosen in 2012 as winner in the Crab Orchard Open Poetry
Competition, Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.
Salt Water Amnesia, Ausable Press
Gender Studies, Miami University Press
The Company of Heaven, Pitt Poetry Series
A Guide to Forgetting, winner in 1987 National Poetry Series, chosen by Tess Gallagher, published by Graywolf Press
Late Stars, Wesleyan University Press
Anthologies
I’ve edited two anthologies, both with Sarabande Books:
Last Call: Poems of Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance
Passing the Word: Poets and Their Mentors.
Chapbooks
My chapbooks include Salt Mother, Animal Dad, chosen by C.K. Williams for the New York City Center for Book Arts Poetry Competition in 2005, White Boys from Hell, C&R Press, 2018, and Blue Book, Seven Kitchens Press, 2023.
Prose
My most recent prose book, The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets, was published to wide attention and acclaim, including a full-page review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
Playwriting
Highlights from my history as half-assed playwright include Down Range, which had successful runs in New York City, Chicago, and Harrisburg PA. Dream On, which had its premier production in February of 2007, by the Cardboard Box Collaborative Theatre in Philadelphia. And, in 2022, in a terrific example of bad covid timing, my musical play The Golden Key was given a staged reading/sing through at the University of Louisville Music School.
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My work has gathered grants, fellowships, and awards from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts (1986, & 2006), the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the state arts agencies of Connecticut, Delaware, and Kentucky.
I’m also grateful for residencies at Yaddo, McDowell, Vermont Studios, The Hermitage, and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown.
I’ve served as Poet-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, the Frost House in Franconia, New Hampshire, and as exchange poet for the Arts Festival in Kildare County, Ireland. My work has been featured numerous times on National Public Radio.
With my wife the writer Sarah Gorham I co-founded Sarabande Books, a literary press, in 1994, in Louisville, Kentucky, where we still live. I am currently Professor Emeritus at The University of Louisville.
Oh, I also take photographs (see Photography).