Joseph was a playright and screenwriter admitted for the first class of MFA candidates in 1993. He had supported his family by writing film scripts in L.A., but wanted to turn his attention to the writing that mattered to him more, playwriting. In his first year, he asked to attend one-day workshop with visiting fiction writer Christopher Tilghman. Tilghman was impressed by what Skibell submitted, and emboldened by the feedback he received, he kept at it, submitting a short story to a Story magazine contest and winning. That story was developed into his thesis novel draft, then completed on a Hall Fellowship at University of Wisconsin the following year and published by Algonquin Books in 1997 as A Blessing On the Moon. The novel was awarded the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named by Publishers Weekly and Amazon.com as one of the year's best books. It has now been translated into half a dozen languages. His second novel, The English Disease, came out in 2003.

Now a tenured professor of the Emory University, Skibell is at work on a third novel and a book of essays. His fiction, essays and journalism have appeared in Tikkun, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and Maggid. Recipient of an NEA fellowship, he has also taught at the Taos Summer Writers Conference, the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, and was visiting distinguished writer at Bar-Ilan University in Israel in 2004.