John Skoyles (poet)

John Skoyles was born in Flushing, New York, the son of Olga (Bertolotti) and Gerard Skoyles, an envelope salesman. He attended Mater Christi High School (now St. John’s Prep) in Astoria, graduating in 1967. He did his undergraduate work at Fairfield University and attended workshops at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, where he was a student of Dick Gallup and Lewis MacAdams. He has an M.A. in English and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.

John Skoyles has taught at Southern Methodist University, Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College (where he directed the MFA program) and Emerson College. He has also served as the Executive Director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown from 1992 to 1994 and again in 2007.

He has written twelve books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry and served as poetry editor of Ploughshares from 2007--2025. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Paris Review and others “My Mother, Heidegger, and Derrida”. He is a member of the Order of the Occult Hand and of the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His latest book of prose is Driven, a memoir in travelogue form. His seventh book of poems, Yes and No, was published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in the fall of 2021. His autobiographical novel, All the Question Marks is forthcoming in 2026 from Unbound Edition Press and his eighth book of poems, That's Where You Come In, will be published that same year by Carnegie-Mellon. He lives in New York City.