Joseph Skibell (born October 18, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist living in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tesuque, New Mexico.

His brother is actor Steven Skybell,[2] with whom he studies in the Talmudic Daf Yomi program.

A recent Senior Fellow at the Bill & Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2014–15), he is currently the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University.

His work has been translated into a half-dozen languages, and he has won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, the Turner Prize for First Fiction and the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction from Texas Institute of Letters, and a fellowship in fiction for the National Endowment for the Arts.

His essays and short fiction have appeared in Story, Tikkun, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Maggid, and other periodicals, as well as in the anthologies Nothing Makes You Free: Writing from the Second Generation On, edited by Melvin Bukiet; Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations, edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville; and Letters to J. D. Salinger, edited by Chris Kubica.