He published these three together afterewards as a collection of three books called Nearing the Millenium. Parts of this collection were recorded at the United States Library of Congress. In 1980, after a competition of four hundred Florida poets, Governor Robert Graham appointed Skellings the Poet Laureate of the State of Florida, a lifetime honor. Skellings published a new collection of poetry, "Living Proof" (1985) with the University Presses of Florida. Living Proof was a collection that celebrated the creative work of both artists and scientists. His most recent book is "Collected Poems 1958-1998", published by the University Press of Florida, Gainesville. The book also contains a Compact Disc recording of Skellings reading fifty Selected Poems. Edmund Skellings poetry has received high praise from some of America's most respected poets. After reading Heart Attacks, Robert Penn Warren wrote Skellings poems had, "True imagination, the real flash of language, the living rhythm." William Stafford wrote, "One of the greatest things since Shakespeare loosed Puck.” And Richard Eberhart wrote, "Racy gifts. They hardly hold themselves down to earth." Skellings purchased his first personal computer in 1978, and immediately applied for a patent which used matching colors on a computer monitor to show relationships between alphanumerics and symbols. He was awarded a United States patent for his color system in 1981, and later received similar patents from the United Kingdom and Canada. Skellings' system of organizing text on a color monitor led to the publication of a color authoring system entitled Electric Poet by International Business Machines Inc. in 1984 and a further product entitled Easy Street by McGraw-Hill. Electric Poet was distributed to English faculty at nine of the state universities in Florida along with an Apple microcomputer. IBM then published Electric Poet along with Comma Cat, and called Skellings' system "the best of the best" in computer-assisted teaching programs. IBM later appointed Edmund Skellings as one the twelve IBM Consulting scholars in the entire nation in 1989 and received a grant to establish a Florida Writers Network to connect three universities creative writing programs. In 1986, Skellings designed and implemented a microcomputer information system for The Florida House of Representatives and its district offices. The system was the first large scale legislative implementation of a token-ring network. It was one of the first government systems to utilize electronic mail to transfer documents. Skellings became the founding Director of the Florida Center for Electronic Communication at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale in 1990.