Joshua Furst is the author of Revolutionaries (Knopf), a novel, and The Little Red Stroller (Dial Books), a children's picture book (illustrated by Katy Wu), both published in 2019.
His first novel The Sabotage Café was named to the 2007 year-end best-of lists of The Chicago Tribune, The Rocky Mountain News, and The Philadelphia City Paper, as well as being awarded the 2008 Grub Street Fiction Prize.
Furst's critically acclaimed book of stories, Short People, was described by the Miami Herald as "a near magical collection." The Los Angeles Times called it "Startling . . . a thoughtful if disturbing portrait of what it means to be a child. Or, more to the point, what it means to be human."
A frequent contributor to the Jewish Daily Forward, he has also been published in The Chicago Tribune, Esquire, Salon, Nerve, Conjunctions, PEN America, Five Chapters, BOMB, and The New York Tyrant, among other journals and periodicals, and been given citations for notable achievement by The Best American Short Stories and The O’Henry Awards.
Among the accolades his work has received are a 2001-2002 James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation/Copernicus Society of America and a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award for his short story "Red Lobster." His criticism for the Forward has received a Rockower Award and been nominated for a 2011 Society of Professional Journalists’ Deadline Club Award.
His plays include Whimper, Myn, and The Ellipse and Other Shapes. They have been produced by numerous theatres, both in the US and abroad, including PS122, Adobe Theatre Company, Cucaracha Theatre Company, HERE, The Demarco European Art Foundation, and Annex Theatre in Seattle.
He studied as an undergraduate at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, receiving a B.F.A in Dramatic Writing and did graduate work at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, from which he received an MFA with Honors.
Joshua Furst is an assistant professor at Columbia University MFA Writing Program and teaches at The New School’s Eugene Lang College. He is a founding member of the publishing collective Kristiania. He lives in New York.
Portrait by Michael Lionstar
