Josh Russell

MFA, Louisiana State University, 1993

Creative Writing, Fiction & Nonfiction

Josh Russell, Director of the Creative Writing Program, has published three novels, three chapbooks of very short prose, and more than a hundred stories and essays. His most recent book is King of the Animals: Stories.

Russell teaches graduate and undergraduate fiction and nonfiction workshops, and seminars on contemporary prose and the form and theory of fiction. His teaching, research, and creative interests include flash fiction, the novella and novel, historical fiction, literary nonfiction, hybrid forms, DIY publishing, and book arts.

He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel, and the Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal for Literary Fiction. His books have been finalists for the Townsend Prize, the Binghamton University John Gardner Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and have been longlisted for The Story Prize.

Russell’s shorter prose has appeared in One Story, Epoch, Seneca Review, the New York Times, Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature, DIAGRAM, Subtropics, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in New Micro, The Best Small Fictions, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover, New Stories from the South, French Quarter Fiction, Flash Nonfiction Funny, and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader.