Penelope Scambly Schott is the recepient of four fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Along with writing, she paints, hikes, indulges her family (especially her dog), and teaches poetry over the internet. She has also worked as donut girl in a cider mill, home health aide, and artist’s model. Her writing residencies have included The Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, Massachusetts), The Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, Vermont), and most recently the Wurlitzer Foundation (Taos, New Mexico) where her next book was dictated to her by a philosophically argumentative magpie.

About Baiting the Void:

"Penelope Scambly Schott’s Baiting the Void is a virtuoso performance of the lyric self molting into myth, into politics, into a sustained sensuality, never choosing the facile perception when a more ample and authentic figuration is possible. In one of the most striking poems in the collection, 'April, Again,' fruit in a dish is described as 'tender ripeness caving in/on itself: the collapse of is into was,' and indeed the poems here arise from experience but move elegantly from 'the pupillary wells that draw us in' into the 'sacrament of moonlessness.' Full of spirit, in the original etymological sense of spirare, or breath, Baiting the Void inhales the mysteries of this world and exhales pure, effulgent song."
—Ravi Shankar

"These poems are a tour de force! They combine acute observation of the natural world with a scrupulous honesty about the human condition. Personal experience merges with economical, yet richly surprising, language in the purest of lyric poems. Time and again, I found myself breathing yes! as Penelope Schott exposed me to the familiar—an old dog, a house wreathed in cloud, one’s own aging face—seen from a new angle and bathed in the light of lovely new words."
—Judith Barrington

"Penelope Scambly Schott’s book Baiting the Void makes us aware of the precarious nature of our ordinary lives. In these lyrical, imaginative, painterly poems, the perceptive voice of this poet speaks of the ephemeral nature of objects in the world and of what really lasts."
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan

"The poems of spiritual questioning of Part I of Baiting the Void are eerie and resonant because the imagery, drawn primarily from nature, is daring. Part II, with such stunning poems as 'The Nature of Clouds' and 'Welcome Home, Soldier,' is even more engaging. What a hot book!"
—Peter Sears