BOOKS
Josh is currently working on his first novel, The Last Full Measure of Devotion. It tells the extraordinary tale of Georgie Bumkin, a shy awkward impoverished 14-year-old white girl of exceptional height, whose life is transformed when she is recruited to join an all-black, all-boys, all-star basketball team. While striving for the league championship, Georgie falls in love with two teammates: Paul Horne-Byrd, the coach’s nerdy son, whose wealthy home is a freewheeling salon of high ideals and low betrayals, and DeQuan Bowers, the star guard, whose tight-knit working-class home is shattered by the hard hand of the criminal justice system. As the season hurtles toward its climax, Georgie must negotiate the joys and heartbreak of first love, the mistakes and misunderstandings of race relations, and her own growing leadership and desire for belonging, until acts of shocking violence tear her community apart.
This novel uses a fun, funny, fish-out-of-water premise to draw the reader into an increasingly emotionally charged and psychologically complex story about race, class, gender, prejudice, privilege, violence, and tolerance. Above all it is an entertaining, big-hearted story of family and friendship, growing older and growing wiser, social justice and self-discovery.
Josh is also halfway through another novel, A Place at the Table of the World, which began as a prequel but turns out will be a sequel -- featuring several of the same characters -- to the first.
This novel uses a fun, funny, fish-out-of-water premise to draw the reader into an increasingly emotionally charged and psychologically complex story about race, class, gender, prejudice, privilege, violence, and tolerance. Above all it is an entertaining, big-hearted story of family and friendship, growing older and growing wiser, social justice and self-discovery.
Josh is also halfway through another novel, A Place at the Table of the World, which began as a prequel but turns out will be a sequel -- featuring several of the same characters -- to the first.
short stories
“Grace”
Josh’s story in Ploughshares was published in the Winter 2012-2013 issue. It was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Check it out here.
Opening Lines:
It's been a month now she's been tutoring a dead girl on Park Avenue.
She says as much into her cell. She's walking fast to the subway so she won't be late--she takes three trains. "We're doing vocab. Great Expectations."
"What's that?" her mom says. "A blond girl? Does her hair color matter?"
"Not what I said," she says, "but I guess not."
“Run”
Josh’s debut story appeared in Ploughshares in the Winter 2011-2012 edition, guest edited by Alice Hoffman.
Click here to buy the issue!
Opening Lines:
This is a story about pretending. Imagine my father, a boy, not the old man who bought this shuttered house I have just cleaned out, here at the tropical tip of Florida, but a boy of six, seven, eight, in a one-room school with snow-bent eaves, with another black eye, another chipped tooth, pretending he's fallen from a tractor again or was kicked by a horse...
“Neighbors,” “Café at Night,” “Do No Harm,” “Was”
These stories have been Finalists four times in contests at Glimmer Train and once at Southwest Review.
Opening Lines of "Cafe at Night":
Fifth Street at Avenue B was quiet an hour before dawn, after the bars had shuttered and before the public school on the avenue opened its iron doors. On the corner stood a quiet café called the Delphi, whose neon sign cast a reddish glow through the dirty windows onto a dirty sidewalk. To look through those windows an hour before dawn was to peer on the habits of lonely insomniacs, the weariness of waiters, and the bright hunger of bartenders and prostitutes just out of work...
“Two Girls,” “Truth and a Coffin,” “The Silence in the House”
These stories were published in The Mind’s Eye, the literary journal of Stanford University, and in the nationally distributed student anthology The Best Young Artists & Writers in America (Scholastic Press).
Opening Lines of "Two Girls":
Some years ago Priyati found herself in Uttar Pradesh with a man named Rajiv. They were in the broad eastern plains, where the country was hot and brown: land that might light all at once if you tossed a match to it...
If publishers will keep taking them, Josh plans to put out a collection featuring these stories and others, entitled You Must Change Your Life.
Josh’s story in Ploughshares was published in the Winter 2012-2013 issue. It was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Check it out here.
Opening Lines:
It's been a month now she's been tutoring a dead girl on Park Avenue.
She says as much into her cell. She's walking fast to the subway so she won't be late--she takes three trains. "We're doing vocab. Great Expectations."
"What's that?" her mom says. "A blond girl? Does her hair color matter?"
"Not what I said," she says, "but I guess not."
“Run”
Josh’s debut story appeared in Ploughshares in the Winter 2011-2012 edition, guest edited by Alice Hoffman.
Click here to buy the issue!
Opening Lines:
This is a story about pretending. Imagine my father, a boy, not the old man who bought this shuttered house I have just cleaned out, here at the tropical tip of Florida, but a boy of six, seven, eight, in a one-room school with snow-bent eaves, with another black eye, another chipped tooth, pretending he's fallen from a tractor again or was kicked by a horse...
“Neighbors,” “Café at Night,” “Do No Harm,” “Was”
These stories have been Finalists four times in contests at Glimmer Train and once at Southwest Review.
Opening Lines of "Cafe at Night":
Fifth Street at Avenue B was quiet an hour before dawn, after the bars had shuttered and before the public school on the avenue opened its iron doors. On the corner stood a quiet café called the Delphi, whose neon sign cast a reddish glow through the dirty windows onto a dirty sidewalk. To look through those windows an hour before dawn was to peer on the habits of lonely insomniacs, the weariness of waiters, and the bright hunger of bartenders and prostitutes just out of work...
“Two Girls,” “Truth and a Coffin,” “The Silence in the House”
These stories were published in The Mind’s Eye, the literary journal of Stanford University, and in the nationally distributed student anthology The Best Young Artists & Writers in America (Scholastic Press).
Opening Lines of "Two Girls":
Some years ago Priyati found herself in Uttar Pradesh with a man named Rajiv. They were in the broad eastern plains, where the country was hot and brown: land that might light all at once if you tossed a match to it...
If publishers will keep taking them, Josh plans to put out a collection featuring these stories and others, entitled You Must Change Your Life.
