Jake Skeets
Jake Skeets (he/him) is Tsi’naajínii born for Tábąąhá; his maternal grandparents are the Táchii’nii and his paternal grandparents are the Tódík’ózhí. Skeets is from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His honors include a 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and Whiting Award. Skeets is an Assistant Professor and teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.
selected publications
POETRY: “Buffalograss,” Poem-a-day
ESSAY: “The Other House: Musings on the Diné Perspective of Time,” Emergence Magazine
POETRY: “Eating Wild Carrots with My Brothers on the Mesa,” The Rumpus
POETRY: “Sonoran Desert Poem,” 92Y
POETRY: “Moth Horse” & “Tó,” Quarterly West
Topics addressed in readings:
Indigenous Queer Theories & Poetics
Dinétics: Navajo Aesthetics and Poetics
Bordertown and Conquest
Memory
Temporality and spatiality
Ecopoetics & ecocriticism
Southwest & Desert Poetics
Visual poetics
Sample workshop 1: Dinétics
A workshop for Diné and Indigenous students that reimagines poetry outside Western contexts. Students will be asked to write poetry through the lens of Indigenous epistemology and methodology.
sample workshop 2: loom poems
A workshop designed to combat colonial modes of nature writing through interrogation of logic, time, and space in poems. Designed as a revision workshop, students will be asked to test the limits of their written work.
sample Workshop 3: remembering as process
A workshop for beginner writers that uses memory as a tool for composing poems. Students will be introduced to what process can look like for poets.
testimonials
““Jake Skeets writes with such sparse yet full beauty, you sometimes don’t know where the source of the power of these poems comes from. It is in the power of his language, in the craft, of course. It is in how the brutal experience of pain and loss can become a thing of beauty, which is where grace lives, which is where the best art comes from. There is so much bottle-dark beauty here. Skeets is a new, essential voice in poetry, in literature.”
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““Jake Skeets’s metamorphic debut, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, replete with poems of depth, musicality, clarity, and associative throughlines, brings its readers towards real and credible meaning. These poems insist upon harbor, limbus, nettle: as in ‘American Bar,’ when we are reminded that it is ‘such a terrible beauty to find ourselves beneath things.’ Skeets’s poems deserve every celebration and rumination; this, as is his work, is irrefutable.”
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