Rate My Professor Brando Skyhorse

Brando Skyhorse is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington, where he serves as Director of Creative Writing in the College of Arts and Sciences. His research interests include fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, and racial passing. A graduate of Stanford University and the University of California, Irvine's MFA Writers' Workshop program, Skyhorse spent ten years in the book publishing industry in New York City before debuting as an author. He joined the IU faculty in 2017 after teaching creative writing at New York University, George Washington University, and Bennington College. Skyhorse teaches fiction and non-fiction writing to undergraduate and graduate students, contributing to the Creative Writing MFA program.

Skyhorse is an acclaimed author whose debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park (Simon & Schuster, 2010), won the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. His memoir, Take This Man: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2014), earned recognition as an Amazon Best Book of the Month and one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Nonfiction Books of the year. He co-edited We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America (Beacon Press, 2017). His latest novel, My Name Is Iris, was published in 2023. Skyhorse has held fellowships at the Ucross Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and served as the 2014-2015 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington University. In 2023, he received the IU Trustees Teaching Award and the IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship for his project 'Last Words,' which examines identity through the lens of race and ethnicity.