Joseph Skerrett

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Joseph T. Skerrett (1943 – July 25, 2015) was an American literary critic and English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He specialized in black studies, and his best-known book is the 2001 anthology Literature, Race and Ethnicity: Contesting American Identities. With Amritjit Singh and Robert E. Hogan, he edited two books on Memory in Ethnic American Literature in 1994 and 1996. Skerrett was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1943 and earned a BA at Saint Francis College in 1964. He then earned an MA in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in 1965 and a PhD in English at Yale University, where his work focused on 20th-century African-American literature. He joined the University of Massachusetts, Amherst English Department in 1973. From 1986 to 1999, Skerrett edited MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, a journal that highlighted diverse American literatures and their connections.