About Judith Skillman
Judith Skillman is a Pacific Northwest poet, editor, translator, teacher, and visual artist. She has published more than twenty full-length poetry collections, along with the craft book Broken Lines—The Art & Craft of Poetry. She co-edited the anthology When Home Is Not Safe (McFarland Books), with Linera Lucas,
Her recent collection, Oppression, examines war, inherited trauma, patriarchal power, marriage, Jewish family history, immigration, disability, and the persistence of beauty amid cruelty. Natural images—birds, horses, plants, weather—run through the darker human material.
Other books include:
Subterranean Address: New & Selected Poems
The Truth About Our American Births
Premise of Light
Kafka’s Shadow
House of Burnt Offerings
The Phoenix: New & Selected Poems
Prisoner of the Swifts
Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Threepenny Review, Commonweal, Zyzzyva, and JAMA.
Skillman’s poems contain organic imagery. She connects intimate domestic experience with mythology, family history, illness, loss, nature, music, and visual art. Her work tends not to explain its meaning directly; it lets precise objects and images carry emotional weight. A recurring quality is the coexistence of tenderness and threat—the natural world can be beautiful, but is never merely comforting.
She holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Maryland and pursued graduate study in comparative literature at the University of Washington. Her honors include support and/or awards from the Academy of American Poets, Artist Trust, the Washington State Arts Commission, and King County Arts Commission. Her chapbook Oscar the Misanthropist won the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.
She has collaborated on translations of Macedonian poet Jovica Eternijan and French-Belgian poet Anne-Marie Derèse. As a painter, she works primarily in oil, and her visual art has appeared in shows and literary journals.
Her body of work contains continuity: decades of attention to memory, family, nature, the body, and the difficult compromises of ordinary life.