Wes Skillings

Wes Skillings retired from newspaper journalism on April 1, 2011, after 38 years as a reporter, columnist and editor where, among his assignments for three different newspapers, he covered everything from municipal meetings to murder trials. He is a Vietnam vet with a BA in English from Mansfield (PA) University, formerly Mansfield State College, where he won a national writing award in 1971 with an essay in The Atlantic Magazine Creative Writing Contests for College Students.

As a journalist, he received numerous Keystone Press Awards from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association (PNA) — fifteen of them over his last 11 years in the business. Eight placed first in the state in their respective categories. His first award as a young reporter came years before in 1980—a first place from the Associated Press Managing Editors of Pennsylvania for exposing shoddy practices in a program overseen by a regional planning agency.

After retirement he continued as a freelance copywriter producing corporate biographies and website content, as well as blogs on various topics on his own website.

Additionally, he is a self-published author whose first book published in 2014 was about one man’s triumph over traumatic brain injury (“A Matter of Recovery: The Story of C.B. Miller”). On October 7, 2022, Skillings published his meticulously researched book about small town justice and its abuses stemming from the October 1973 murder of a twelve-year-old girl: “Mosaic Pieces: Surviving the Dark Side of American Justice.” At around the same time, Amazon introduced an illustrated children’s book, “Visit to a Queen,” edited and co-written by Skillings, about two children learning valuable life lessons after being miniaturized into the realm of honeybees.

It's only fitting that a journalist who covered so many events and subjects in newspapers would claim such a variety of topics as a published book author— true crime, brain science and imaginative children’s literature.