John Skoyles (poet)
Early years
John Skoyles was born in Flushing, New York, the son of Olga (Bertolotti), a housewife, and Gerard Skoyles, an envelope salesman. He attended Mater Christi High School, graduating in 1967. He did his undergraduate work at Fairfield University in Connecticut, and earned an M.A. in English and an M. F. A. at the University of Iowa.
Career
John Skoyles has taught at Southern Methodist University, Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College (where he directed the MFA program for eight years) and Emerson College for twenty-five years (where he chaired the Writing, Literature and Publishing Program). He has also served as the Executive Director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown from 1992-94 and again in 2007.
He has written eleven books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry and is the poetry editor of Ploughshares. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and others. He is a member of the Order of the Occult Hand and of the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His latest book is Driven, a memoir in travelogue form.
Bibliography
Poetry
- Collections
- Skoyles, John (1981). A little faith : poems. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press.
- Permanent Change (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991)
- Definition of the Soul (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998)
- The Situation, poetry (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007)
- Suddenly It's Evening: Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2016)
- Inside Job: New Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2016)
- List of poems
Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected |
---|---|---|---|
Autobiography | 2014 | Skoyles, John (March 31, 2014). "Autobiography". The New Yorker. 90 (6): 62–63. | |
Novels
- A Moveable Famine (The Permanent Press, 2014)
Non-fiction
- The Smoky Mountain Cage Bird Society and Other Magical Tales from Everyday Life (New York: "Kodansha International, 1997)
- The Nut File (Quale Press, 2017)
- Driven (MadHat Press, 2019)
- Memoirs
- Generous Strangers and Other Moments from My Life (New York: Kodansha International, 1999) This is a re-titled paperback reprint of "The Smoky Mountain Cage Bird Society."
- Secret Frequencies: A New York Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003)
References
External links
Sources
Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2005.