Over the past three decades Judith Skillman has written and published numerous poems for books, journals, and anthologies.  She has collaborative translations from Portuguese, Italian, and French. Skillman's publications include FIELD, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, The Northwest Review, and Midwest Quarterly.  She has ten books of poems.

From 1977 - 1978 she held a teaching assistantship at the University of Maryland, while working towards my masters degree in English Literature.  She received the King County Arts Commission’s Publication Prize in 1987, judged by Madeline DeFrees.  This prize enabled her to find a publisher for her first book, “Worship of the Visible Spectrum” (Breitenbush Books.) In 1991 Skillman was awarded a Washington State Arts Commission Writer’s Fellowship. 

Three residencies during the 90’s, one from the Hedgebrook Cottages for Women Writers, and two from the Centrum Foundation, allowed her to pursue her creative work while raising three children.  In addition, she received the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship in 1992 to attend the Centrum Writer’s Conference. Other awards include the Stafford Award from the Washington Poet’s Association, First Prize in the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference, and Honorable Mentions from The Journal and Kalliope.

Judith did graduate work in Romantic Literature and Translation Seminars at the University of Washington in the Department of Comparative Literature from 1994 - 1995.  She was commissioned from 1994 - 1997 as a literary artist member of a three-person team to create an original artwork for the Kent Regional Justice Center. Her poem “The Jury” is etched in the windows of the jury waiting room.

Poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 1984 and 2001.  She also published two books of poems with Blue Begonia Press. The first, “Beethoven and the Birds,” was funded by the press, and the second, “Storm,” received additional support from the Eric Mathieu King Fund Award (Academy of American Poets).  Her collection “Red Town,” published by Silverfish Review in 2001, received a Bumbershoot Literary Arts Award and was a finalist in the Washington Center for the Book Award.  “Circe’s Island,” was published by Silverfish Review Press (2003).

In 2003 she was a finalist in the David Robert Books Competition and her book, “Latticework,” the result of a collaboration with textile artist Erika Carter, was published in 2004.   “New and Selected Poems: 1986 – 2006” was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2006, with an introduction by David Kirby.

In August of 1999, Skillman was a translator in residence at the European  College of Literary Translators and Interpreters in Seneffe, Belgium.  She is a member of the Richard Hugo House and Associated Writing Programs (AWP).  Currently, she teaches writing at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Washington.

Read Judith's Ars Poetica.

What Others Say

If we opened up, we'd feel this storm under the skin of even the sunniest picnic afternoon, but survival seems to require closing off most of our perceptions. Shall we open Skillman's book, then? Pricked and prodded by her restless, strenuous interrogations of the world we thought we knew, we'll shift uncomfortably, failing to find a place where the heart can rest. That's the point. 
    —Judy Lightfoot

In Judy Skillman's sixth book, Circe's Island, one can see the knobs of the telescope turning, the images coalescing, the focus becoming clearer. With ever more attention to accuracy in metaphor, she builds new windows, then opens them wide, inviting the reader through.... 
    —Tina Kelley, New York Times reporter

Skillman's poems move out from their opening point meditatively and delicately to embrace distant sights, memories of the past, other countries, and also mythologies and similarities. "Bearing the universal/forward in each particular...," she writes in "Cardoon." She is not seeking anything in this movement--neither knowledge nor possession nor control. The movement is not an urge, but rather the natural penchant to connect with what is beyond the immediate self. Things within the broader world are connected by a tissue of shared qualities. "Increments of blue and pink chalk/can be made..."-- from "On Circe's Island". Or, as she writes in "Zaydee," "...pink fragments claim/the edge of a wave...." Skillman's poems are created by following where an initial sensed quality leads; and all of the world, from objects to envisionings, is spun together by qualities similar and different.
    —Henry Berry

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Judith Skillman