Johanna Skibsrud

Johanna Skibsrud teaches English and Creative Writing with special interests in modern and contemporary poetry, fiction, drama, performance studies, and philosophy. She completed her PhD from the University of Montreal in 2012 with a dissertation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellowship from 2012-2014. In 2018 she was awarded a Fulbright US Scholars fellowship to study the critical, creative and pedagogical applications of clowning, in part at the École International de Théatre Philippe Gaulier. Johanna is the author of three novels: Island (Hamish Hamilton Canada 2019), Quartet for the End of Time (Norton 2014), and the Scotiabank Giller Prize winning, The Sentimentalists (Norton 2011), two collections of short fiction: Tiger, Tiger (Hamish Hamilton Canada 2018) and This Will Be Difficult to Explain, and Other Stories (Norton 2012), four collections of poetry: Medium (Book*hug 2024), The Description of the World (Wolsak and Wynn 2016), I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being (Gaspereau 2010) and Late Nights For Wild Cowboys (Gaspereau 2008), and three non-fiction titles: Fool (Routledge 2023), The Poetic Imperative: A Speculative Aesthetics (McGill-Queen's University Press 2020) and "The nothing that is": Essays on Art, Literature and Being (Book*hug 2019). Her writings and essays have appeared, among other places, in Lithub, Granta magazine, and the LA Review of Books.