Joshua Furst is the author of two books, Short People, a collection of stories, and The Sabotage Café, a novel.

His critically acclaimed book of stories, Short People, was published in 2003 and described by the Miami Herald as “a near magical collection.” The Los Angeles Times called it “Startling . . . a thoughtful if disturbing...more »

Joshua Furst is the author of two books, Short People, a collection of stories, and The Sabotage Café, a novel.

His critically acclaimed book of stories, Short People, was published in 2003 and 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.” And the Times of London said "Any one of these stories is enough to break your heart. . . . Joshua Furst's debut is both enjoyable and important.” When The Sabotage Café was published in August 2007, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said it “should not be missed by anyone who has an adolescent or has been one…The book is itself a kind of brick hurled at a Starbucks window, but much more dangerous in the end.”

His work has been published in The Chicago Tribune, Conjunctions, Five Chapters and The Crab Orchard Review among other places and given citations for notable achievement by The Best American Short Stories in 2005 and The O’Henry Awards in 2007.

Among the awards and grants he has received are a 2001-2002 James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation/Copernicus Society of America, a 1997 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award for his short story “Red Lobster,” a Walter E. Dakins Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2007 and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and ArtOmi/Ledig House. He was a finalist for the 1992 Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and a runner up in the 2001 Playboy College Fiction Contest.

From 1993 through 1998, he was an active participant in the New York alternative theatre scene. Among other accomplishments in this field, he helped organize and run Nada Theatre’s 1995 Obie award winning Faust Festival and was one of the producers of the 1998 New York RAT conference which brought experimental theatre artists from across the United States together for a week of performance and symposia. His plays include Whimper, Myn and The Ellipse and Other Shapes. They have been produced by numerous theatres, both in the United States 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 BFA in Dramatic Writing in 1993 and did graduate work at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, from which he received an MFA with Honors in 2001.

Joshua Furst lives in New York City, and teaches fiction and playwriting at The Pratt Institute. « less