He studied as an undergraduate at New York University"s Tisch School of the Arts, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing in 1993 and did graduate work at The University of Iowa Writers" Workshop, from which he received an Master of Fine Arts with Honors in 2001.
Born in Boulder, Colorado, he lived for much of his early life in rural Wisconsin. Joshua Furst"s 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. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed book of stories, Short People.
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. Joshua Furst lives in New York City, and teaches at The New School’s Eugene Language College.
His protégé is the writer Lonely Christopher. "Black Ice," A Podcast for Bomb Magazine"s Fiction for Driving Across America series
"Requiem for a Regular," Mr.
Bellar"s Neighborhood
"In Sirte," Slate.com
"Jonathan Franzen"s Jewish Riddle," Mischief and Mayhem
"The Noble Beast," Furst on Norman Mailer, Pen America
"A Font of Inspiration," Esquire.com
Theater Reviews for the Jewish Daily Forward
Interviews and Reviews for The Rumpus.
A frequent contributor to The Jewish Daily Forward, he has also been published in The Chicago Tribune, Conjunctions, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association America, Five Chapters and The New York Tyrant among many other journals and periodicals and been given citations for notable achievement by The Best American Short Stories and The O’Henry Awards. His work has received a 2001-2002 James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation/Copernicus Society of America, a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. 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.
He is a founding member of the literary collective Krïstïanïa.
