Joseph Skibell is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

ist and essayist living in Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. According to the 2010 census, Atlanta's population is 420,003. Atlanta is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, which is home to 5,268,860 people and is the ninth largest metropolitan area in...

.

Skibell is the author of three novels, which use elements of history and fantasy:

• A Blessing on the Moon (1997)
• The English Disease (2003)
• A Curable Romantic (2010)

Early life

Skibell was born in Lubbock, Texas. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...

 in 1981, he took a Master of Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts

A Master of Fine Arts is a graduate degree typically requiring 2–3 years of postgraduate study beyond the bachelor's degree , although the term of study will vary by country or by university. The MFA is usually awarded in visual arts, creative writing, filmmaking, dance, or theatre/performing arts...

 degree from the Texas Center of Writers (now the Michener Center for Writers

Michener Center for Writers

The Michener Center for Writers is an interdisciplinary Masters of Fine Arts program in fiction, poetry, playwriting, and screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin.-History:...

) in 1996.

Academic career

He was the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Fellow in Fiction at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin in Madison during the academic year of 1996-97. In 2002, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Skibell has taught at the University of Wisconsin, the Humber School for Writers, the Taos Summer Writers Conference, and Bar-Ilan University. He is currently an associate professor of English in the Creative Writing program at Emory University.

Prizes and Recognition

His work has been translated into a half-dozen languages, and he has won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Steven Turner Prize for First Fiction and the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction from Texas Institute of Letters.

His essays and short fiction have appeared in Story, Tikkun, The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, Poets & Writers, Maggid, and other periodicals, as well as in the anthologies Nothing Makes You Free: Writing from the Second Generation On, edited by Melvin Bukiet; Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations, edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville; and Letters to J. D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980....

, edited by Chris Kubica.

His novel, A Curable Romantic, has been nominated for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature.