Jeffrey Skinner

Jeffrey Skinner is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry.  His most recent book of poems, Chance Divine, won the Field Prize and was published in 2017.  In 2015 Skinner was given one of eight American Academy of Arts & Letters Awards, for exceptional accomplishment in writing.  In 2006 he was awarded his second Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  His poems, plays and stories have also gathered grants, fellowships, and awards from such sources as the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the state arts agencies of Connecticut, Delaware, and Kentucky. He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, The Frost Place, the MacDowell Colony, The Hermitage, and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. His work has been featured numerous times on National Public Radio.   Skinner has served as Poet-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, and the Frost Place in New Hampshire.

He has published six previous collections of poems: Late, A Guide to Forgetting (a winner in the 1987 National Poetry series), The Company of Heaven, Gender Studies, Salt Water Amnesia, and Glaciology, which won the 2012 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Award.  Skinner has edited two anthologies, Last Call: Poems of Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance; and Passing the Word: Poets and Their Mentors.  Skinner's poems, stories, plays and essays have appeared in many literary journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Bomb, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and the Georgia, Iowa, Southern, and New England Reviews.

He also writes plays, and his full-length play Down Range has had successful limited runs in New York City, Chicago, and Harrisburg PA.  Along with his wife, the writer Sarah Gorham, he is co-founder of Sarabande Books.  He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he is Professor Emeritus at the University of.