Amanda C. Skuldt is the winner of the 2025 Black Horse Review poetry contest and regular slam performer with Tidal Tongues poetry. She is a nerdy old forest punk who loves to explore everything from tide pools and botanical gardens to rotting wood and mongoose tracks and currently resides on the side of an active volcano in the jungles of Hawai’i with her wife and a menagerie of animals. Born to a Mormon family and raised in Utah, she spent time as a teenager at the Challenger Foundation wilderness survival school, the subject of a Netflix documentary Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare. 

Amanda has written for the Washington Post and is author of the entry on Terrorism and Foreign Policy in the Wiley-Blackwell The International Studies Encyclopedia. Her doctoral dissertation, “State Sponsored Terrorism? Leadership Survival and the Foreign Policy of Fear", was featured in "Selected Dissertations and Theses on Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence, 1980-2013", in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism. This scholarly work underpins her deep understanding of political conflict and state manipulation, elements that are regular themes of her work.

Her academic and professional expertise is complemented by her hands-on experiences as a young adult in the rugged landscapes of southeastern Alaska, where she lived with a band of fisher folk and forest punks in a self-built, self-managed community in the forest and worked in the commercial fishing industry.

When not working on one of her many writing projects including Mindspire, the second novel in the Scattershot trilogy, performing at local poetry slams, or wrangling cats, Amanda is a cybersecurity Compliance Engineer, a Doctor of Philosophy in Government—focused on political violence and terrorism—and an avid reader of neuroscience, quantum physics, fiction, and philosophy.