Floyd Skloot

Floyd Skloot (July 6, 1947, Brooklyn, New York) is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist who has often written about the search for meaning through personal loss and the struggle for coherence in a fragmented world.

Life
Skloot received a B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College and an M.A. in English at Southern Illinois University, where he studied with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. A New Yorker, Skloot moved to Portland, Oregon in 1984. He is married to painter Beverly Hallberg, who specializes in both abstract and impressionist landscapes, and is the father of the bestselling non-fiction writer Rebecca Skloot, whose work includes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot and Hallberg live in Oregon.

Skloot is the author of seventeen books, including the memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (2003) and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life (2008). He has contributed to publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Hudson Review, Boulevard, and Southwest Review. His book reviews frequently appear in the Boston Globe,New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Harvard Review. Skloot and his daughter co-edited The Best American Science Writing 2011 for HarperCollins/Ecco, published in September 2011. He published his first collection of short stories in September 2011, "Cream of Kohlrabi," from Tupelo Press and in 2013, he will publish "Close Reading," his seventh book of poetry, also from Tupelo Press.

Living with brain damage
Some of his work has dealt with his battle with neurological damage caused by a virus (brain lesions) he contracted in 1988.

In 1988, Floyd Skloot contracted a virus that targeted his brain and severely impacted his ability to perform the most basic of daily activities. "After putting the leftover chicken in a plastic bag, I stick it back in the oven instead of the refrigerator. I put the freshly cleaned pan in the refrigerator, which is how I figure out that I must have put the chicken someplace else because it's missing. I pick up a chef's knife by its blade." Brain damage had also affected his ability to connect names to faces, follow directions, and he now uses a cane to assist in his loss of balance. Because of his ailment, Skloot's essays may take up to two years to fully complete and is done so in pieces or incomplete segments over time. Nonetheless, the completion of a poem, essay, or a piece of fiction leaves Skloot feeling as though he has overcome the offense (brain damage) that he has described as the means to silence his "ability to concentrate and remember, to spell or conceptualize, to express myself, to think." Being that every creative thought only comes at spontaneous moments, Skloot must use his full amount of careful concentration to grasp these ideas and shape them to fit into his work. Whereas before brain damage he would listen to jazz music while writing, he now finds it tremendously distracting along with any and all of the most minute noises.

Now in his 60s, Skloot confronts the question if he will ever "get better" by simply stating that he will never be the man that he was; that he has learned to perceive the world more clearly and slowly since his ailment. In his memoir, In the Shadow of Memory, Skloot explains "I have changed. I have learned to live and live richly as I am now. Slowed down, softer, more heedful of all that I see and hear and feel, more removed from the hubbub, more internal."

Recognition
Skloot has received the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, three Pushcart Prizes, two Pacific NW Booksellers Book Awards, and two Oregon Book Awards. His essays have been reprinted twice each in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science Writing, and The Best Spiritual Writing, andThe Best Food Writing, and also inThe Art of the Essay, "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet," and "The Touchstone Anthology of Creative Nonfiction."

In May 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin & Marshall College. In January 2010, Poets & Writers, Inc. named him one of fifty of the most inspiring authors in the world.

Poetry

 * Music Appreciation. University Press of Florida, 1994.
 * The Fiddler's Trance. Bucknell University Press, 2001.
 * The Evening Light. Story Line Press, 2001.
 * Approximately Paradise. Tupelo Press, 2005.
 * The End of Dreams. Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
 * Selected Poems: 1970-2005. Tupelo Press, 2008.
 * The Snow's Music. Louisiana State University Press, 2008.
 * Close Reading. Tupelo Press, 2013.

Novels

 * Pilgrim's Harbor. Story Line Press. 1992
 * Summer Blue. Story Line Press. 1994
 * The Open Door. Story Line Press. 1997
 * Patient 002. Rager Media. 2007

Short fiction

 * Cream of Kohlrabi. Tupelo Press, 2011

Creative Nonfiction

 * The Night Side. Story Line Press, 1996.
 * In the Shadow of Memory. University of Nebraska Press, 2003
 * Reprinted in UNP's Bison Books paperback, 2004.
 * The World of Light. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
 * Reprinted in UNP's Bison Books paperback, 2011.
 * The Wink of the Zenith: The shaping of a writer's life. University of Nebraska Press, 2008
 * Reprinted in UNP's Bison Books paperback, 2011.

Edited

 * The Best American Science Writing 2011 (co-edited with Rebecca Skloot)., New York: HarperCollins/Ecco Press, 2011