joe_optThis was a delightful hour with award winning writer, Joseph Skibell.

Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels, A Blessing On The Moon, The English Disease, and 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 Millenium: A Novelist Reads The Talmud (June 2016).

He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, and the Turner Prize. 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); “magical” (New Yorker); “high-energy, wild” (New Republic); and “wholly original” (JM Coetzee). Skibell’s novels, stories and essays have been widely anthologized and translated, most recently into Ido and Chinese.

He has written or translated essays for three books of photographs: Loli Kantor’s Beyond The Forest, Neil Folberg’s The Serpent’s Chronicle, and Fred Stein: Paris New York. From 2008 to 2015, he was the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. Recently a Senior Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta and Tesuque, NM.