Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist and arts leader. He is artistic and executive director of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute at UNLV and editor-in-chief of The Believer magazine.
Josh’s books include Lincoln’s Melancholy, named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Josh is also author of Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity. His Atlantic cover stories include "What Makes Us Happy?" about the psychiatrist George Vaillant and the "Harvard happiness study." He's published in Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, GQ, The Nation, Riverteeth, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the anthology Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression.
Josh is a longtime curator, storyteller, and founding advisor to The Moth. His story “You Can Come Back” appeared on the Moth Radio Hour, which Josh helped create as a member of The Moth’s Board of Directors. (The show now airs on more than 475 public radio stations around the world.) The story will also appear in the Moth’s book Occasional Magic.
