The Phoenix

No detail is too quotidian to escape the dream catcher of this poet's imagination. Drawing on sources as various as Native American lore, Eastern European folktales, classical literature, Shakespearean tragedy, pop culture icons, childhood fantasies and dreams, along with her own considerable powers of invention, Skillman presents us with a psychological landscape as diverse as contemporary American experience. While the starting point of many of these poems is isolated, personal experience-a breast biopsy, a mislaid set of keys-the personal here becomes collective. This drive to mythologize experience becomes for poet Judith Skillman the allembracing, energetic, ongoing, many-storied project of a lifetime. -Belle Randall ...Judith Skillman's dense, fragmentary images, her directness in speaking to the reader, and her interest in interweaving Greek mythology with everyday life put me in mind of the work of Sappho of Lesbos, one of the Western world's most celebrated women poets. -JoSelle Vanderhooft Judith Skillman's ability to wring emotional value from mundane encounters in the concentration of an image, the brush stroke of a narrative, teaches me poetry's ever widening sweep and mystical scope, echoing dogma by simultaneously escaping it into the eternal realm of wild beauty. -Michael Daley Few poets seize the natural world in the tender, particular ways that poet Judith Skillman does... For a poet who sees this world as does Skillman, nature's beauty and cruelty is ours as well. -Chicago Sun-Times Book Review Judith Skillman was born in Syracuse, New York, of Canadian parents, and holds dual citizenship. She is an amateur violinist, the mother of three grown children, and the "Grammy" of twin girls. She holds a Masters in English Literature from the University of Maryland, and has taught at University of Phoenix, Richard Hugo House, City University, and Yellow Wood Academy. The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book Storm (Blue Begonia Press), Skillman's also been awarded a King County Arts Commission (KCAC) Publication Prize, Public Arts Grant, and Washington State Arts Commission Writer's Fellowship. Two of her books were finalists for the Washington State Book Award (Red Town and Prisoner of the Swifts). Skillman's poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Ms. Skillman has been a Writer in Residence at the Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, and The Hedgebrook Foundation. At the Center for French Translation in Seneffe, Belgium, she translated French- Belgian poet Anne-Marie Derese. A Jack Straw Writer in 2008 and 2013, Skillman's work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the UK Kit Award, Best of the Web, and is included in Best Indie Verse of New England. For more information, visit www.judithskillman.com