Floyd Skloot,

              Writer

Floyd Skloot is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, and novelist whose work has appeared in such distinguished magazines as The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Poetry, American Scholar, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Boulevard, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, and Shenandoah.  His fifteen books include the memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), A World of Light (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); the poetry collections The Evening Light (Story Line Press, 2001), Approximately Paradise (Tupelo Press, 2005), The End of Dreams (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), Selected Poems: 1970-2005 (Tupelo Press, 2008), and The Snow's Music (Louisiana State University Press, 2008); and the novels Summer Blue (Story Line Press, 1994) and Patient 002 (Rager Media, 2007). 

He contributes book reviews to the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Harvard Review, Sewanee Review and other publications, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Floyd’s awards include the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction; the Independent Publishers Book Award in Creative Nonfiction; two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Awards in poetry; Oregon Book Awards in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry; three Pushcart Prizes; two appearances in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science Writing, and The Best Spiritual Writing, and once each in  The Best Food Writing, and The Art of the Essay; and residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s study center in Bellagio, Italy, and the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island, Ireland.  His books have also been finalists for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay, and the Paterson Poetry Prize.  In May, 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin and Marshall College, his alma mater.

In its January/February 2010 issue, Poets & Writers named Floyd as one of "The Fifty Most Inspiring Authors in the World," a list of "the living authors who shake us awake, challenge our ideas of who we are, embolden our actions, and, above all, inspire us to live life more fully and creatively." About Floyd's work, P&W says "Despite virus-induced brain damage, he writes with surprising tenderness and candor about recreating a life for himself and, in the process, makes us think about our own."

A feature on his work in the March 2009 issue of Journal of Medical Humanities says, "Floyd Skloot's writing has transformed the genre of creative nonfiction/memoir both because he is a crisp, lyrical, wonderful writer who knows how to narrate and dramatize, move us and make us think, as well as explain issues in neurological research in clear and accessible ways, and because he maps out a new and important territory of writing, that of the neurologically atypical about their own experiences.  Floyd Skloot's writing will be personally meaningful to any of us who wonder about our neurological futures. He is both a compassionate forerunner on a road most of us will travel, and one of the truly exciting new voices on the contemporary literary scene."

Floyd has taught at the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers Conference at Goucher College and the Paris Writers Workshop.

He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Beverly Hallberg, a master gardener and landscape painter, whose light-filled works cross between impressionistic and abstracted styles.  Her paintings grace the covers of Floyd's books, Approximately Paradise, The End of Dreams, Selected Poems: 1970-2005, and The Snow's Music.   See her work at www.beverlyhallberg.com.

Floyd’s daughter, Rebecca Skloot, is a widely published nonfiction writer whose first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is forthcoming from Crown Books in February, 2010.  Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Oprah Magazine and Popular Science.  She teaches creative nonfiction writing in English Department at the University of Memphis.  Visit her website at www.rebeccaskloot.com.

Skloot is represented by Andrew Blauner at Blauner Books Literary Agency. Contact him at: Blauner@aol.com.