Floyd Skloot

Floyd Skloot is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, and novelist whose work has appeared in such distinguished magazines as The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Poetry, American Scholar, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Boulevard, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, and Shenandoah.

His many books include The Snow's Music: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, September 2008) and the memoir, The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life (University of Nebraska Press, September 2008).

A few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm currently reading the galleys of Patrick French's forthcoming biography of V.S. Naipaul and will follow that with the galleys of Paul Mariani's on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Literary biography is a mainstay of my reading.

I'm also partway through Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger: New & Selected Poems 1976-2006 and just finished James Wood's How Fiction Works.

I also just finished reading the manuscript of my daughter Rebecca Skloot's forthcoming book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which Crown will publish next fall. Without any bias at all, I must say it's brilliant, a book that combines the best of narrative nonfiction, science writing, race relations, medical ethics and riveting prose.

Visit Floyd Skloot's website.

--Marshal Zeringue