Arlo Haskell


Arlo Haskell is an American author, publisher, and literary organizer.

Early life and education

Arlo Haskell was born and raised in Key West, Florida, where his mother, Monica Haskell, was director of the Key West Literary Seminar during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Haskell attended Bard College in the late 1990s, where he studied poetry and was a student of John Ashbery. After college, he worked for David Wolkowsky, ferrying guests to Wolkowsky’s private island and doing other odd jobs.

Career

In 2017, Haskell authored and published his first work of nonfiction, The Jews of Key West: Smugglers, Cigar Makers, and Revolutionaries . Critics generally praised the social history for its depth of research and style, arguing that it had filled gaps in regional Florida history and in American Jewish history. In a review for the Journal of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, Raymond Arsenault remarked that it “introduces a fascinating cast of characters, revealing a unique saga of Jewish community life that no previous historian has chronicled.” The Jews of Key West won the Phillip and Dana Zimmerman Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction from the Florida Book Awards and a President’s Medal from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association. Haskell is also the author of the poetry collection, Joker.
Haskell is the publisher of Sand Paper Press, a small press he founded in 2003, where he has frequently collaborated with poet and translator Stuart Krimko. Publications include The Last Books of Héctor Viel Temperley, which was translated from Spanish by Krimko and named a BOMB Editor’s Choice. Another Sand Paper title, Harry Mathews’s The New Tourism, was co-edited by Haskell and selected as a “Book of the Year” by The Times Literary Supplement.
Haskell is currently executive director of Key West Literary Seminar, the nonprofit organization whose eponymous writers’ conference has been held annually since 1983. His career with the organization began in 2008, when he led the digitization of its extensive audio archive. Since his promotion to executive director in 2015, Haskell has increased the organization’s scholarship program, launched a literary walking tour of Key West, and created writing programs for local high school students. In 2019, he led the organization in its $1.2 million purchase of the former home of poet Elizabeth Bishop.
On June 4, 2019, Haskell was proclaimed the Poet Laureate of Key West by the Mayor, Vice Mayor and Board of Commissioners of Key West.