About

Emily Skaja was born and raised in rural Illinois. Her first book, BRUTE, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets (Graywolf Press, 2019). She holds an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati, where she was a Taft Summer Research Fellow and also earned a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Emily is the Poetry Co-Editor of Southern Indiana Review. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, an AWP Intro Journals Award, an Academy of American Poets College Prize, and a 2019-2020 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.