Judith Skillman is the winner of numerous awards, including the Eric Mathieu King Fund from the Academy of American Poets and the Stafford Award from the Washington Poets Association. She has received grants from Centrum Foundation, King County Arts Commission, and the Washington State Arts Commission. Her poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Malahat Review, and many other journals. Her previous volumes of poems are Worship of the Visible Spectrum (Breitenbush Books, 1986); Beethoven and the Birds (Blue Begonia Press, 1996); Storm (Blue Begonia, 1998); and Red Town (Silverfish Review Press, 2001). Her chapbook Sweetbrier was published in 2001 as part of the Blue Begonia Working Signs Series. Circe’s Island was released in 2003 from Silverfish Review Press. Skillman holds a Masters in English Literature from the University of Maryland. She has done graduate work in Translation Studies at the University of Washington, and teaches Humanities courses at City University in Bellevue, Washington.

Other poems by Judith Skillman in Verse Daily:
May 6, 2004:  "Lattice, The Arbor and The Espalier"   "By its milky light the sun left to grow..."
October 16, 2002:  "Lilacs"   "Because they signify a life / less sterile, I twist their stems..."

Praise for Judith Skillman:

"Judith Skillman is a poet whose mind, memory, and imagination appearmore compelling than the mundane realities of her life. Her poems often include a kind of arrested motion what signals the clash of domestic chores with artistic contemplation."
—Madeline DeFrees

"Judith Skillman stitches a collection of mysterious holes in time that take us from youth to middle age. The visual narrative of the poet’s inner life traces time’s latticework threads with entrances and exits, stops and starts, wishes and regrets. The trellis, with its ins and outs, becomes a structure full of openings that may or may not permit our entrance, a pierced wall that blocks creative flow, keeps us at bay, and attempts to decry immortality. A flight of ravens fills 'the sky until it darkened midday, eclipse-like;' the ripe apple 'fell, lay where it fell, spotted.' Life’s continuous 'slip of fabric' is 'rent and sewn together' as we travel the poet’s seamed and solemn path."
—Joan Stuart Ross

"'Above, below, it’s all the same/to a woman who has deep cleaning/left in her bones.' The surface can’t be trusted because surfaces leave nothing left to value. The artist has long since taken leave of the kind of house-keeping,home-making, order-rendering work. Women embroidering. Another kind of traditional work for women. Embroidery elaborates and embellishes with fictitious detail, covering up the real work. Embroidery is pleasing to the eye, but traditionally unimportant. The needle goes deeper here, insisting on a different kind of honesty. It’s lonelier, and more frightening, even in the collaboration."
—Jim Bodeen