Ed Skoog Biography

Ed Skoog (born 1971, Topeka, Kansas) is an American poet.
He graduated from Kansas State University, and from the University of Montana, with an MFA. He worked at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He taught at Tulane University, and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He lived in southern California, where he was chair of creative writing at Idyllwild Arts Academy. He was writer-in-residence at the Hugo House. He has been the Jennie McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellow at George Washington University. He lives in Seattle and Washington, D.C. He is currently a visiting writer at the University of Montana.
His poems have been published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and The Paris Review.
The phrase "Mister Skylight" is an emergency signal to alert a ship's crew, but not its passengers, of the emergency. Skoog's debut collection, Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), is an alert to disasters and to the hope of rescue. Interior dramas of the self play out in a clash of poetric traditions, exuberant imagery, and wild metaphor.
His second book of poems, Rough Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a 2013 Lannan Literary Selection, finds unity in a fixation on American events and landscapes.