Jake Skeets
Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. His work has appeared in journals and magazines such as Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. Other honors include an NEA Grant for Arts Projects, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is from the Navajo Nation and was appointed the 3rd Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.
selected publications
POETRY: “Buffalograss,” Poem-a-day
ESSAY: “The Other House: Musings on the Diné Perspective of Time,” Emergence Magazine
POETRY: “Eating Wild Carrots with My Brothers on the Mesa,” The Rumpus
POETRY: “Sonoran Desert Poem,” 92Y
POETRY: “Moth Horse” & “Tó,” Quarterly West
Topics addressed in readings:
Indigenous Queer Theories & Poetics
Dinétics: Navajo Aesthetics and Poetics
Bordertown and Conquest
Memory
Temporality and spatiality
Ecopoetics & ecocriticism
Southwest & Desert Poetics
Visual poetics
Sample workshop 1: Dinétics
A workshop for Diné and Indigenous students that reimagines poetry outside Western contexts. Students will be asked to write poetry through the lens of Indigenous epistemology and methodology.
sample workshop 2: loom poems
A workshop designed to combat colonial modes of nature writing through interrogation of logic, time, and space in poems. Designed as a revision workshop, students will be asked to test the limits of their written work.
sample Workshop 3: remembering as process
A workshop for beginner writers that uses memory as a tool for composing poems. Students will be introduced to what process can look like for poets.
testimonials
““Jake Skeets writes with such sparse yet full beauty, you sometimes don’t know where the source of the power of these poems comes from. It is in the power of his language, in the craft, of course. It is in how the brutal experience of pain and loss can become a thing of beauty, which is where grace lives, which is where the best art comes from. There is so much bottle-dark beauty here. Skeets is a new, essential voice in poetry, in literature.”
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““Jake Skeets’s metamorphic debut, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, replete with poems of depth, musicality, clarity, and associative throughlines, brings its readers towards real and credible meaning. These poems insist upon harbor, limbus, nettle: as in ‘American Bar,’ when we are reminded that it is ‘such a terrible beauty to find ourselves beneath things.’ Skeets’s poems deserve every celebration and rumination; this, as is his work, is irrefutable.”
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