Bio
Josh is an author, screenwriter, educator, and journalist. He loves hearing, telling, and sharing stories. His work is voice-driven, sweeping in scope, emotionally resonant, and deeply concerned with how historical and cultural forces act on the lives of individuals. He views writing as a form of imaginative exploration, its purpose to discover, not define; to vivify, not dissect.
Josh's short fiction has been published several times in Ploughshares, honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review, and appeared in The Mind’s Eye, Long Form, and the annual anthology The Best Young Writers In America, among others. 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 at Stanford University. Josh holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where he was a Gaston Fellow. He has since taught undergraduate fiction at Columbia as an adjunct professor. He has also been awarded two writing fellowships at the Catwalk Arts Institute, where he wrote most of his debut novel, The Next Big Thing.
As a screenwriter, Josh's feature script A House Divided, a black comedy-drama about a family torn apart by an unexpected inheritance, won a National Golden Brad in Screenwriting and is in development with Elder Pictures in Los Angeles. His short film Jackson Parish (Dir. Edward McDonald, 11 min., 2011), 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 Imelda Marcos and her husband in the Philippines, with Joan Chen (The Last Emperor) attached to star as the glamorous and deadly Imelda. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Josh also co-wrote, co-produced, and co-directed, with Liam Brady, the 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 to fiction and film, Josh worked as a staff reporter at his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. He published more than a hundred articles on crime, courts, religion, housing, youth culture, sports, politics, and city life, including six stories on Page 1, as well as travel features, humor pieces, book reviews, and music reviews. His journalism has also appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and Aegis, among others.
As an educator, Josh has taught fiction as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and is the Founder and Director of J-Prep Tutoring, an education company offering a wide variety of services, including academic tutoring, test preparation, and college application support, to students around the world. The company is based in New York and Chicago, and also maintains a growing presence online. Please see www.jpreptutoring.com.
Raised on the shore of Lake Michigan in Evanston, Ill., just north of Chicago, Josh grew up in a tight-knit half-WASP half-Jewish family whose boisterous arguments and constant (mostly loving) shouting encouraged his lifelong love of wit and debate. He first imagined himself as a writer at the age of ten, when he began devouring fantasy novels by the truckload, beginning with J.R.R. Tolkien before proceeding to David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Jordan and the like. In high school, he discovered modernist writers such as Hemingway, Camus, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Wright, Kazantzakis, Faulkner, and Hesse, followed by more contemporary authors from Morrison to Garcia Marquez, Rushdie to Roy, Alice Munro to Zadie Smith. At Stanford University, he majored in English with an interdisciplinary focus in film, reported for the Stanford Daily, wrote and directed short films with the Stanford Film Society, and earned a Presidential Scholarship to study Anglo-Indian literature in Kolkata, India.
Josh has always been politically active and is a longtime volunteer for the Democratic Party. Informed by his deep readings in history, psychology, and political science, he supports many important social and political causes, including arts education, voter enfranchisement, universal health care, a living wage, affordable childcare, parental leave, stronger unions, antitrust action, environmental protections, immigration reform, a stronger safety net, and criminal justice reform. His writing life is deeply connected to these social and political goals. It is the mass movements of ideas, working their slow powers upon the minds of society, that are the ultimate spur and safeguard of lasting change.
Josh splits his time between the East Village of Manhattan and Evanston, Illinois. He and his wife Davinia Troughton have two young sons and share an egalitarian approach to parenting. In his (very) spare time, Josh might be found playing basketball, running, reading, pacing on the phone while talking to old friends, or watching the rain fall as he plots his next novel.
Josh's short fiction has been published several times in Ploughshares, honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review, and appeared in The Mind’s Eye, Long Form, and the annual anthology The Best Young Writers In America, among others. 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 at Stanford University. Josh holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where he was a Gaston Fellow. He has since taught undergraduate fiction at Columbia as an adjunct professor. He has also been awarded two writing fellowships at the Catwalk Arts Institute, where he wrote most of his debut novel, The Next Big Thing.
As a screenwriter, Josh's feature script A House Divided, a black comedy-drama about a family torn apart by an unexpected inheritance, won a National Golden Brad in Screenwriting and is in development with Elder Pictures in Los Angeles. His short film Jackson Parish (Dir. Edward McDonald, 11 min., 2011), 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 Imelda Marcos and her husband in the Philippines, with Joan Chen (The Last Emperor) attached to star as the glamorous and deadly Imelda. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Josh also co-wrote, co-produced, and co-directed, with Liam Brady, the 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 to fiction and film, Josh worked as a staff reporter at his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. He published more than a hundred articles on crime, courts, religion, housing, youth culture, sports, politics, and city life, including six stories on Page 1, as well as travel features, humor pieces, book reviews, and music reviews. His journalism has also appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and Aegis, among others.
As an educator, Josh has taught fiction as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and is the Founder and Director of J-Prep Tutoring, an education company offering a wide variety of services, including academic tutoring, test preparation, and college application support, to students around the world. The company is based in New York and Chicago, and also maintains a growing presence online. Please see www.jpreptutoring.com.
Raised on the shore of Lake Michigan in Evanston, Ill., just north of Chicago, Josh grew up in a tight-knit half-WASP half-Jewish family whose boisterous arguments and constant (mostly loving) shouting encouraged his lifelong love of wit and debate. He first imagined himself as a writer at the age of ten, when he began devouring fantasy novels by the truckload, beginning with J.R.R. Tolkien before proceeding to David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Jordan and the like. In high school, he discovered modernist writers such as Hemingway, Camus, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Wright, Kazantzakis, Faulkner, and Hesse, followed by more contemporary authors from Morrison to Garcia Marquez, Rushdie to Roy, Alice Munro to Zadie Smith. At Stanford University, he majored in English with an interdisciplinary focus in film, reported for the Stanford Daily, wrote and directed short films with the Stanford Film Society, and earned a Presidential Scholarship to study Anglo-Indian literature in Kolkata, India.
Josh has always been politically active and is a longtime volunteer for the Democratic Party. Informed by his deep readings in history, psychology, and political science, he supports many important social and political causes, including arts education, voter enfranchisement, universal health care, a living wage, affordable childcare, parental leave, stronger unions, antitrust action, environmental protections, immigration reform, a stronger safety net, and criminal justice reform. His writing life is deeply connected to these social and political goals. It is the mass movements of ideas, working their slow powers upon the minds of society, that are the ultimate spur and safeguard of lasting change.
Josh splits his time between the East Village of Manhattan and Evanston, Illinois. He and his wife Davinia Troughton have two young sons and share an egalitarian approach to parenting. In his (very) spare time, Josh might be found playing basketball, running, reading, pacing on the phone while talking to old friends, or watching the rain fall as he plots his next novel.
