Floyd Skloot is the author of three novels, Pilgrim's Harbor (1992), Summer Blue (1994) and The Open Door, which was named one of the ten Best Books of 1997 in the Pacific Northwest by the Portland Oregonian and the Eugene Register-Guard. His 1996 collection of essays about the illness experience, The Night-Side, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by New Age Journal. He has also published two collections of poetry, Music Appreciation (University Press of Florida) and Poppies (Silverfish Review Press/Story Line Press), and his third collection, The Evening Light, will appear in 2000 from Story Line Press.

Skloot's work has appeared in such distinguished American magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry, The American Scholar, Commonweal, Virginia Quarterly Review, Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Boulevard, New England Review, Shenandoah, Sewanee Review and Southern Review. His work has also been published in Ireland, Wales, England, Australia, Canada, Norway and Peru. His poems, stories and essays have been widely anthologized. A review of his Music Appreciation from The Hudson Review is reprinted here.

Among Skloot's awards are the selection of his work for inclusion in The Best American Essays of 1993 and citations for distinguished essay writing in The Best American Essays of 1994, 1996 and 1998, and in the Pushcart Prize anthologies for 1994, 1996, 1998. He received the William A. Stafford Fellowship in Poetry fro Oregon Literary Arts, Inc., poetry fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and Oregon Institute of Literary Arts, a fiction fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, and annual prizes from Southwest Review (for an essay), Kansas Quarterly (for a short story) and The Greensboro Review (for a poem). He was awarded writing residencies at Centrum, in Port Townsend, WA, at the Villa Montalvo, in Saratoga, CA, and at the Heinrich Boll cottage on Achill Island, in Ireland.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1947, Skloot has degrees in literature from Franklin and Marshall College and Southern Illinois University, where he studied with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella and the late novelist John Gardner. He worked for seventeen years in the field of public policy before being disabled in 1988. He lives in Amity, Oregon, with his wife Beverly Hallberg, in a small round house that Beverly built herself in the middle of twenty hilly acres of woods.