Bio
Josh is a prize-winning author, screenwriter, and journalist. He writes because he loves hearing, telling, and sharing stories. His work is typically voice-driven, highly literary but briskly plotted, and deeply concerned with how social and cultural forces act on the individual. He views his writing as a form of imaginative exploration, its purpose to discover, to vivify, and ultimately, to reshape each other and the world.
Josh's short fiction has been published multiple times in Ploughshares, honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review, and appeared in The Mind’s Eye, LongForm, and the annual anthology The Best Young Writers In America. His stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Award, and the David Nathan Myerson Memorial Prize, and won the Bocock-Guerard Prize for Fiction from Stanford University. Josh holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Gaston Fellow and the faculty invited him to teach before he finished his degree. He has been awarded two writing fellowships from the Catwalk Arts Institute, during which time he completed his debut novel, The Next Big Thing.
As a screenwriter, Josh's feature script A House Divided, a funny-sad drama about a family torn apart by an unexpected inheritance, won a National Golden Brad and is in development with Elder Pictures in Los Angeles. His short Jackson Parish (Dir. Edward McDonald, 11 min., 2010), about a young man returning to his family roots in rural Louisiana, showed at festivals across the country, earned the NYU-Tisch First Run Screenwriting Award, and was a Finalist in the Johnson & Johnson Lens on Talent Contest shown on BET. Another feature screenplay, Two Terrorists Meet, co-written with Anthony Rocco, is a political thriller about the CIA-assisted overthrow of the brutal Marcos regime in the Philippines, with Joan Chen (The Last Emperor) attached to star as the glamorous and dangerous Imelda Marcos. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Josh also co-wrote, co-produced, and co-directed, with Liam Brady, the short film “Rock Paper Scissors" (35 min., 2003) which opened and closed the 2003 Stanford Film Festival before showing at festivals around the country.
Before turning primarily to fiction and film, Josh took his first job out of college as a staff reporter at his hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune. He published more than a hundred articles on crime, courts, religion, housing, youth, sports, and city life, including six stories on Page 1. He also wrote travel features, humor pieces, book reviews, and music reviews.
In addition to his writing life, Josh loves to teach. He has been an adjunct professor of fiction at Columbia University, and is the founder and director of J-PREP Tutoring, an educational services company based in New York with a growing presence in person and online around the world. Please see www.jpreptutoring.com.
Raised in Evanston, Ill., just outside Chicago, Josh grew up in a tight-knit half-WASP half-Jewish family whose boisterous arguments and affection-expressed-through-yelling-and-shouting encouraged his lifelong love of words and debate. He first imagined becoming a writer around the age of eleven, when he began devouring hundreds of fantasy novels a year, from J.R.R. Tolkien to David Eddings to Anne McCaffrey to Robert Jordan. His ambition deepened in high school when he discovered writers like Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Morrison, Fitzgerald, Wright, Woolf, Garcia Marquez, Kazantzakis, Camus, and Hesse. At Stanford University, where he majored in English, he reported for the Stanford Daily, made films with the Stanford Film Society, and earned a Presidential Scholarship to study Anglo-Indian literature in Calcutta, India.
Josh is politically active and a longtime volunteer for the Democratic Party. He supports a variety of urgent causes, including arts education, voter engagement, a living wage, universal health care, protections for immigrants, social rights, and criminal justice reform. His writing life is deeply connected to his social and political beliefs. He thinks that the mass movement of ideas, which work their slow power upon the minds of society, is the ultimate spur and safeguard of lasting cultural and political change. Therefore, he considers his purpose, as a writer, both to create a compelling evocation of consciousness and place that will last for centuries, and to promote deeper empathy and new understanding that leads to positive change now.
Josh lives with his wife Davinia and two young sons, Leo and Elliot, in the East Village of Manhattan. He and his family travel frequently, especially to Malaysia, England, and Spain, where they have family. When Josh is at home and not writing, in his (very) spare time, he might be found playing basketball, running, reading, napping, pacing on the phone while talking to old friends who now live faraway, or watching the rain fall as he plots his next novel.
Josh's short fiction has been published multiple times in Ploughshares, honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review, and appeared in The Mind’s Eye, LongForm, and the annual anthology The Best Young Writers In America. His stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Award, and the David Nathan Myerson Memorial Prize, and won the Bocock-Guerard Prize for Fiction from Stanford University. Josh holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Gaston Fellow and the faculty invited him to teach before he finished his degree. He has been awarded two writing fellowships from the Catwalk Arts Institute, during which time he completed his debut novel, The Next Big Thing.
As a screenwriter, Josh's feature script A House Divided, a funny-sad drama about a family torn apart by an unexpected inheritance, won a National Golden Brad and is in development with Elder Pictures in Los Angeles. His short Jackson Parish (Dir. Edward McDonald, 11 min., 2010), about a young man returning to his family roots in rural Louisiana, showed at festivals across the country, earned the NYU-Tisch First Run Screenwriting Award, and was a Finalist in the Johnson & Johnson Lens on Talent Contest shown on BET. Another feature screenplay, Two Terrorists Meet, co-written with Anthony Rocco, is a political thriller about the CIA-assisted overthrow of the brutal Marcos regime in the Philippines, with Joan Chen (The Last Emperor) attached to star as the glamorous and dangerous Imelda Marcos. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Josh also co-wrote, co-produced, and co-directed, with Liam Brady, the short film “Rock Paper Scissors" (35 min., 2003) which opened and closed the 2003 Stanford Film Festival before showing at festivals around the country.
Before turning primarily to fiction and film, Josh took his first job out of college as a staff reporter at his hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune. He published more than a hundred articles on crime, courts, religion, housing, youth, sports, and city life, including six stories on Page 1. He also wrote travel features, humor pieces, book reviews, and music reviews.
In addition to his writing life, Josh loves to teach. He has been an adjunct professor of fiction at Columbia University, and is the founder and director of J-PREP Tutoring, an educational services company based in New York with a growing presence in person and online around the world. Please see www.jpreptutoring.com.
Raised in Evanston, Ill., just outside Chicago, Josh grew up in a tight-knit half-WASP half-Jewish family whose boisterous arguments and affection-expressed-through-yelling-and-shouting encouraged his lifelong love of words and debate. He first imagined becoming a writer around the age of eleven, when he began devouring hundreds of fantasy novels a year, from J.R.R. Tolkien to David Eddings to Anne McCaffrey to Robert Jordan. His ambition deepened in high school when he discovered writers like Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Morrison, Fitzgerald, Wright, Woolf, Garcia Marquez, Kazantzakis, Camus, and Hesse. At Stanford University, where he majored in English, he reported for the Stanford Daily, made films with the Stanford Film Society, and earned a Presidential Scholarship to study Anglo-Indian literature in Calcutta, India.
Josh is politically active and a longtime volunteer for the Democratic Party. He supports a variety of urgent causes, including arts education, voter engagement, a living wage, universal health care, protections for immigrants, social rights, and criminal justice reform. His writing life is deeply connected to his social and political beliefs. He thinks that the mass movement of ideas, which work their slow power upon the minds of society, is the ultimate spur and safeguard of lasting cultural and political change. Therefore, he considers his purpose, as a writer, both to create a compelling evocation of consciousness and place that will last for centuries, and to promote deeper empathy and new understanding that leads to positive change now.
Josh lives with his wife Davinia and two young sons, Leo and Elliot, in the East Village of Manhattan. He and his family travel frequently, especially to Malaysia, England, and Spain, where they have family. When Josh is at home and not writing, in his (very) spare time, he might be found playing basketball, running, reading, napping, pacing on the phone while talking to old friends who now live faraway, or watching the rain fall as he plots his next novel.
