Karen Skolfield

Karen Skolfield’s book Battle Dress (W. W. Norton, 2019) won the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry and the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry and the First Book Award from Zone 3 Press, and is a Massachusetts “Must Read” selection.

Skolfield is the winner of the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review, the 2015 Robert H. Winner award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2015 Arts & Humanities Award from New England Public Radio.

She’s received fellowships and awards  from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Split This Rock, Ucross Foundation, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems can be found in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Baltimore Review, Boulevard, Carolina Quarterly, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Common, Guernica, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Memorious, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, POETRY Magazine, RHINO, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, Slice, Sugar House Review, Superstition Review, Washington Square Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She was the poet laureate for Northampton, Massachusetts, from 2019-2022.

Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts.