24 Facts About Edmund Skellings

Edmund Skellings was the Poet Laureate of Florida from 1980 to 2012, and was succeeded by Peter Meinke.

In 1957, Skellings graduated with English honors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Edmund Skellings received his doctorate in British and American literature from the University of Iowa, where he taught prosody and metrics in the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

Edmund Skellings organized the Alaska Flying Poets, a group of five professors from the Workshop who flew a small airplane around Alaska and the Midwest to talk to high school students about the value of learning to write well.

In 1967, Edmund Skellings joined the faculty of Florida Atlantic University where he taught Understanding Poetry and Shakespeare.

In 1973, Edmund Skellings became Director of the International Institute of Creative Communication at Florida International University which brought poetry in the schools programs to over 100,000 children in South Florida.

Edmund Skellings then published three volumes of poetry: Heart Attacks, Face Value and Showing My Age with the University Presses of Florida.

Edmund Skellings published these three together afterewards as a collection of three books called Nearing the Millenium.

Edmund Skellings published a new collection of poetry, Living Proof with the University Presses of Florida.

The book contains a Compact Disc recording of Edmund Skellings reading fifty Selected Poems.

Edmund Skellings poetry has received high praise from some of America's most respected poets.

Edmund Skellings purchased his first personal computer in 1978, and immediately applied for a patent which used matching colors on a computer monitor to show relationships between alphanumerics and symbols.

Edmund Skellings was awarded a United States patent for his color system in 1981, and later received similar patents from the United Kingdom and Canada.

In 1986, Edmund Skellings designed and implemented a microcomputer information system for The Florida House of Representatives and its district offices.

Edmund Skellings became the founding Director of the Florida Center for Electronic Communication at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale in 1990.

The Florida Center for Electronic Communication achieved an international reputation for the quality of its graduate program and the unique form of award-winning animated computer poems Edmund Skellings taught his students to create.

Edmund Skellings ended up being responsible for bringing over six million dollars to Florida Atlantic University during his time there from 1990 to 2006.

In 1992, Edmund Skellings developed yet another way to teach poetry by generating moving pictures to illustrate ideas in lines of poems.

Edmund Skellings won awards from the New York Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival, National Poetry Festival Telly Awards, Berlin Film Festival, and the Image Forum Festivals in Japan.

In 2002, Edmund Skellings won the Videographer Crystal Award of Excellence for his video disc Word Songs, a surround sound recording of his own poetry and the first collection of 3D animated poetry in the world.

The Edmund Skellings Collection contains literary correspondence, reviews of Skellings' poetry and innovative research, publications, lectures, and interviews.

Dr Edmund Skellings was appointed a University Professor of Humanities at the Florida Institute of Technology in 2008, where he divided his time writing poetry and promoting programs in the humanities.

Edmund Skellings retired in 2011 and decided to step down from his lifetime appointment at the same time to allow new poets to take this honorary position.

Edmund Skellings died in his West Melbourne, Florida, home on August 19,2012.