Josh Barkan biography

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Josh Barkan

Josh Barkan

Josh Barkan Biography

Josh Barkan was born in Santa Monica, California. At the age of three he moved to Iowa City, where his mother taught comparative literature and his father political science at the University of Iowa. He spent a number of years living abroad as a child, because of his parents' work, first in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, then in Paris, Nairobi and New Delhi. The combination of living in foreign countries and an interest in politics, history, and literature became the central focus of his writing. During his junior year at Yale, he began to write seriously, after receiving two fellowships that allowed him to spend a summer in Jamaica, living in a thatched roof hut on a rural farm, banging out a novel on a second hand typewriter. A year later, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, and he moved to the small town of Sabae, Japan. There, besides playing in a Bluegrass band—with Japanese banjo, fiddle, and Dobro players—and singing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in a choir and biking along rice paddies, he discovered the beauty of Kyoto and the silent devastation of Hiroshima.

Returning to the U.S. from Japan, he finished his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he studied with James Alan McPherson, Frank Conroy, Deborah Eisenberg and Thom Jones.

Josh has won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and been a finalist for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in Esquire.

With his wife, a painter from Mexico, he divides his time between Mexico City and Roanoke, Virginia.

Josh Barkan's website

This bio was last updated on 03/07/2017. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Books by Josh Barkan at BookBrowse
Mexico jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Josh Barkan but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Daniel Alarcon

    Daniel Alarcon

    Born in Lima, Peru in 1977, Alarcón was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning magazine published in his native Peru, and in 2013 served as a Fellow in the Investigative... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Mexico

    Try:
    At Night We Walk in Circles
    by Daniel Alarcon

  • Maxine Beneba Clarke

    Maxine Beneba Clarke

    Maxine Beneba Clarke is a novelist, poet, and editor living in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to being a recipient of the Hazel Rowley Fellowship for Biography she is also the winner of the 2013 Victorian Premier's Award ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Mexico

    Try:
    Foreign Soil
    by Maxine Beneba Clarke

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