"Skibsrud’s choice to ground her poetic inquiry in the central role of self-knowledge makes her book a lyric inquiry, which means The Poetic Imperative invites this lyric question: what is the risk of a poetics that places self-knowledge at its center? What gets left out?" Read more here.
"We Have Always Been Tragic" article in LA Review of Books Quarterly "Pop" issue, May 2020
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN TRAGIC: GREEK PLAYS FOR THE MODERN AGE by Johanna Skibsrud
“In the ancient Greek context, tragedies
employed masks — a performance
element that explicitly connected Greek
drama with the ritual practices from
which it emerged. For both theater and
ritual, masks created a liminal space in
which the borders between self and other,
the represented and the real, became
blurred and uncertain.”
Interview with Lisa De Nikolits
Released last fall by Hamish Hamilton Canada, and coming out in paperback, and in the US, this fall—Island covers a period of just twenty-four hours in which my characters’ lives and realities are profoundly changed." I began work on the book shortly after completing my second novel, Quartet for the End of Time—a novel that spans several decades and involves an intricate network of both real and fictional characters and historical events. In many ways, I envisioned Island as Quartet’s opposite…
Read the complete interview here!
Review by Lanie Tankard in The Woven Tale Press
"There's nothing like The Nothing That Is. In these Essays on Art, Literature and Being, Johanna Skibsrud set herself a daunting task: To search for what hasn't yet been imagined. And in doing so, she found nothing less than imaginative new ways of being. " Read full review here
Hyacinth podcast series: "Writing Life: How stories make and break us."
Listen to the full interview with Carmel Mikos here.