Emily Skillings

Acclaimed Poet & Teacher

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • List, Collage, Assemblage
  • A Place for Poetry in Your Prose
  • Feminist Intertextualities
  • An Evening with Emily Skillings

Biography

“Although her language sometimes suggests she is from another planet, Emily Skillings knows how history happens on ours.” —John Ashbery

“Emily’s just trying to make us watch better. I love this poet’s compulsive sense of risk, her sense of humor. I love her dread. I love her love of detail. Her revulsion. So finally, basing this opinion on my exploration of this one writer, I’ll say that bitches are smart. Emily Skillings is very special. I’ll keep reading her.” — Eileen Myles

“One of Skillings’s greatest charms is her saucy, nonchalant feminist discontent.” —Publishers Weekly

“Having been a dancer has made me a better poet, as I feel I am able to access sensation, gravity, gesture and space in a heightened way.” —Emily Skillings

Poet and dancer Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut,” and was shortlisted for The Believer 2018 Poetry Prize. The judges’s citation read: “This book is replete with lines that reverberate, like echoing prayers, at once a promise from God and to God.” In Emily’s own words, “Some of the shared attentions and themes of the book include depression, gender, color, painting and visual art, toxic white femininity, cloudiness, somatic experience, cantankerousness, jealousy, sex, light, America, collage, feelings without names, looming dread, boredom, water.”

Skillings has also authored the chapbooks Backchannel (Poor Claudia, 2014) and Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants. Of Backchannel, Todd Colby wrote: “delightful meditative mantra loops that leave me laugh-gasping with her ability to tickle and stab at the very same time. Skillings writes of canaries, shitsponges, bacteria rafts, and a site in Alaska known as “Dispersed Media Steepletop.” Who could ask for anything more? This chapbook is a funny and fierce debut worthy of your attention and love.”

She is recently the editor of John Ashbery’s posthumous collection of poems Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works. Skillings is currently at work on a book-length poem sequence called Mother of Pearl about the environment, “and whether or not I want to eventually have children.”

Skillings is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series.

She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017, and has taught creative writing at Yale University, Columbia University School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, Poets House, and through Brooklyn Poets.

Skillings is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Short Bio

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not and two chapbooks, Backchannel and Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants. She is recently the editor of John Ashbery’s posthumous collection of poems Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works. Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, and jubilat. Skillings is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective and small press. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017, and has taught creative writing at Yale University, Columbia University School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, Poets House, and through Brooklyn Poets. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

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