Bio
Josh is a prize-winning author, screenwriter, and journalist. He writes because he loves hearing, telling, and sharing stories. He views writing as a form of imaginative exploration, its purpose to discover, not deconstruct; to vivify, not dissect.
Josh earned his MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Gaston Fellow and invited to teach before he finished his degree. His first story was published in Ploughshares, which has since brought out more of his work, including his most recent story which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His fiction has also appeared in The Mind's Eye, been honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review, been nominated for the David Nathan Meyerson Memorial Prize, and earned the Bocock-Guerard Prize for Fiction from Stanford University.
As a screenwriter, Josh has two feature scripts in development. A House Divided won a National Gold Brad in Screenwriting. The story of two brothers divided by an inheritance, it is being developed by Elder Pictures with Brent Huff (Stealing Beauty) attached to direct. Two Terrorists Meet, co-written with Anthony Rocco, is a political thriller about Imelda Marcos, with Joan Chen (The Last Emperor) attached to star. Josh also co-wrote the award-winning short film “Jackson Parish” (Dir. Edward McDonald, 2009), which won Best Screenplay at the NYU-Tisch First Run Film Festival, was a finalist in the Johnson & Johnson Lens on Talent competition, and was shown on television. His first film, which he co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed, was “Rock Paper Scissors” (2003).
Before turning to fiction and film, Josh took his first job as a staff reporter at his hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune. He reported on crime, courts, religion, and housing, among other subjects, and wrote travel stories, features, and book and music reviews, eventually publishing more than one hundred bylined articles, including six on Page 1.
In addition to his writing life, Josh loves to teach, and is the founder and director of J-PREP Tutoring, an educational support company based in New York with a growing presence around the world. Please see www.jpreptutoring.com.
Raised in Evanston, Ill., Josh grew up in a tight-knit half-WASP half-Jewish family whose boisterous debates and affection-often-expressed-through-yelling encouraged his lifelong love of words. He decided to become a writer around the age of ten, when he devoured hundreds of fantasy novels, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Robert Jordan, an ambition that deepened when he discovered writers like Hemingway, Morrison, Dostoevsky, Garcia Marquez, Kazantzakis, Woolf, Wright, Camus, and Hesse in high school. He attended Stanford University, where he majored in English, reported for the Stanford Daily, wrote fiction, made films with the Stanford Film Society, and earned a Presidential Scholarship grant to study Anglo-Indian literature in Calcutta, India.
Josh lives with his wife Davinia and son Leo in the East Village in Manhattan, where they are expecting another child. When not writing, in the little spare time he finds, he is often playing basketball, supporting justice activism, or watching the rain fall and plotting his next novel.
Josh earned his MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Gaston Fellow and invited to teach before he finished his degree. His first story was published in Ploughshares, which has since brought out more of his work, including his most recent story which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His fiction has also appeared in The Mind's Eye, been honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review, been nominated for the David Nathan Meyerson Memorial Prize, and earned the Bocock-Guerard Prize for Fiction from Stanford University.
As a screenwriter, Josh has two feature scripts in development. A House Divided won a National Gold Brad in Screenwriting. The story of two brothers divided by an inheritance, it is being developed by Elder Pictures with Brent Huff (Stealing Beauty) attached to direct. Two Terrorists Meet, co-written with Anthony Rocco, is a political thriller about Imelda Marcos, with Joan Chen (The Last Emperor) attached to star. Josh also co-wrote the award-winning short film “Jackson Parish” (Dir. Edward McDonald, 2009), which won Best Screenplay at the NYU-Tisch First Run Film Festival, was a finalist in the Johnson & Johnson Lens on Talent competition, and was shown on television. His first film, which he co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed, was “Rock Paper Scissors” (2003).
Before turning to fiction and film, Josh took his first job as a staff reporter at his hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune. He reported on crime, courts, religion, and housing, among other subjects, and wrote travel stories, features, and book and music reviews, eventually publishing more than one hundred bylined articles, including six on Page 1.
In addition to his writing life, Josh loves to teach, and is the founder and director of J-PREP Tutoring, an educational support company based in New York with a growing presence around the world. Please see www.jpreptutoring.com.
Raised in Evanston, Ill., Josh grew up in a tight-knit half-WASP half-Jewish family whose boisterous debates and affection-often-expressed-through-yelling encouraged his lifelong love of words. He decided to become a writer around the age of ten, when he devoured hundreds of fantasy novels, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Robert Jordan, an ambition that deepened when he discovered writers like Hemingway, Morrison, Dostoevsky, Garcia Marquez, Kazantzakis, Woolf, Wright, Camus, and Hesse in high school. He attended Stanford University, where he majored in English, reported for the Stanford Daily, wrote fiction, made films with the Stanford Film Society, and earned a Presidential Scholarship grant to study Anglo-Indian literature in Calcutta, India.
Josh lives with his wife Davinia and son Leo in the East Village in Manhattan, where they are expecting another child. When not writing, in the little spare time he finds, he is often playing basketball, supporting justice activism, or watching the rain fall and plotting his next novel.