Knute Skinner Biography

Knute Skinner was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in nearby Webster Groves. He attended college at Culver-Stockton and at the University of Northern Colorado, where he received a BA in speech and drama. He then did graduate work at Middlebury College and at the University of Iowa, where he was also an instructor in the English Department.
His first book of poetry, Stranger with a Watch, appeared in 1965 and contained early poems written in Iowa. His second collection, A Close Sky over Killaspuglonane (1968), showed the influence of the people and the landscape of rural Clare. Since then, he has published eight more books and six chapbooks. His poems, which have appeared widely in serial publications in Ireland, England, Australia and North America, show a variety of styles, including both free and formal verse. Two collections, The Bears and What Trudy Knows, demonstrate a marked departure from his usual lyric mode, as the poems are all fictional narratives highlighting brief moments in the lives of the imagined narrators. In 2007 Salmon Poetry brought out a collected edition, Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007 and in 2010 Salmon published a memoir, Help Me to a Getaway. In 2013 a new collection, Concerned Attentions, appeared from Salmon.