Ed Skoog was born in Topeka in 1971 and went to Topeka High School. He graduated from Kansas State University, then went to the University of Montana for his MFA.

Skoog has taught at Tulane University, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and The Idyllwild Arts Foundation in Idyllwild, California.

He has been the recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Lannan Foundation, the Richard Hugo House, and the Jenny McKean Moore Writer Fellowship in Washington at George Washington University. He was in residence at Marfa in January 2013. He is currently a visiting writer at the University of Montana.

Poetry:

• Run the Red Lights (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)
  
• Rough Day (Copper Canyon, 2013)
  
• The Reinvention of Suffering (Body, 2012)
  
• Like Night Catching Jackrabbits in its Barbed Wire (American Poetry Review, 2008)
  
• Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
  
• Field Recordings (LitRag Press, 2003)
  
• Toolkit (University of Montana, 1995)
  
• King of Sweden: Poems (University of Montana, 1996)
  

Narratives:

• West Coast (2009)
  

Home at Thirty

On the street at midnight, I hear a hatbox latch fall open
in an attic closet, and then
the silence of Alexandria.

Even low clouds' dark stucco seems
applied by the drowsiest journeyman.

The fire hydrant stares
from its tricolor at a branch
fallen in the street.

A nail punches antennae up the chaain,
a great excursion to the loose
bold where a little water drips.

---from Mister Skylight

In Snow

Each morning, I checked the radiator
to see what it had been singing
all night into the drip basin,
then pulled on my child-wardrobe
of corduroy, flannel, and moon boot,

and walked gently in the cold
to bring wild birds breakfast
before mine. Each morning,
I had to clear the snow away,
whether new-fallen or drift,

all the way down to dead
leaves and grass. Out of a blue
coffee can, cold through gloves,
I proured thistle, millet, cracked
corn and splintered sunflower.

Each morning, the Latter-Day saints
living across the street would file
to their station wagon as I poured.
I only had the dusting away of white,
that setting-out seed for no harvest.

---From Field Recordings

Marble Faun Prize in Poetry by the Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Society (2005)
Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America (2007)
Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship (2012)

• http://edskoog.com/
• Lunch Box podcasts, featuring Ed Skoog and J. Robert Lennon.