Joseph Skibell's debut novel, A Blessing on the Moon, received the prestigious Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. A Book of the Month Club selection, the book was named one of the year's best by Publishers Weekly, Le Monde and Amazon.com, and has been translated into half a dozen languages. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Patrick Giles, said of A Blessing on the Moon: "Daring in its haunting, often painful honesty, dense in thoughtful observation and unsparing incident, the novel is confirmation that no subject lies beyond the grasp of a gifted, committed imagination." A theater/dance adaptation of the book is in the works, a collaboration between the director Rebecca Novick, the choreographer Rebecca Salzar (both of San Francisco) and Emory University's Theater Emory.

Skibell's second novel, The English Disease, received the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. In addition, his work has been widely anthologized and his short stories and essays have appeared in Story, Tikkun, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and other periodicals.

A recipient of a Halls Fellowship, a Michener Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Skibell has taught at the University of Wisconsin, the Humber School for Writers, the Taos Summer Writers Conference, and Bar-Ilan University. He joined the English Department/Creative Writing Program at Emory University in 1999, and is working on a third novel.

Listen to an interview with Joseph Skibell recorded for Wisconsin Public Radio at http://outloud.pw.org