Josh Barkan was awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught writing at Harvard, New York University, and Boston University and is the author of the short-story collection Before Hiroshima. His first novel, Blind Speed, was named a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Fiction Prize.
He spent much of his childhood abroad, living in Kenya, Tanzania, France, and India. After attending Yale University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, he spent a year teaching in Japan and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His writing has appeared in Esquire and as a contributor to The Boston Book Review. In 2011-2012 he was the writer-in-residence in Braddock, Pennsylvania, for Into the Furnace.