Joseph SkibellWinship Distinguished Research Professor in the HumanitiesProfessor of English and Creative Writing

Professor Joseph Skibell (pronounced SKY-bell) studied at the University of Texas, Yale University, the University of Chicago and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.

He is the author of three prize-winning and critically acclaimed novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, A Curable Romantic; a collection of true stories, My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things; and a mythopoetic study entitled Six Memos From the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. 

His work has been described as “daring in its … honesty” (New York Times); “witty and profound” (Jerusalem Report); “laugh-out loud humorous” (Forward); “brave … unafraid” (New York Journal of Books); “high-energy, wild” (New Republic); and “wholly original” (JM Coetzee).

He has received numerous awards, most notably the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature, the Turner Prize, and Story Magazine’s Short Short-Story Prize.

Skibell's stories, essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, LitHub, Tablet, the Utne Reader, Fretboard Journal, Acoustic Guitar, and many other publications. 

Director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature from 2008 to 2015 and a recent Senior Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Skibell has been a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, Bar-Ilan University, and the Michener Center for Writers.

His upcoming books include Last of the Brooklyn Kabbalists: In a Circle of Sacred Friendships, and the novel Dr. Bopstein and the U.S. Dept. of Dreaming.