Joshua Furst, author of the novel, "Revolutionaries" 

About Joshua Furst

 Joshua Furst is the author of Revolutionaries (Knopf), a novel, and The Little Red Stroller (Dial Books), a children's picture book (illustrated by Katy Wu), both published in 2019. 

His first 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. Ad Busters described it as "a masterful book." O, The Oprah Magazine said "The Sabotage Café shows debut novelist Joshua Furst in full control of his psychologically complex material, with a tale of 'emotional bondage' as chilling as it is heartbreakingly real."

Furst's critically acclaimed book of stories, Short People, was 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 (London) said "Any one of these stories is enough to break your heart. Joshua Furst's debut is both enjoyable and important."

A frequent contributor to the Jewish Daily Forward, he has also been published in The Chicago Tribune, Esquire, Salon, Nerve, Conjunctions, PEN America, Five Chapters, BOMB, and The New York Tyrant, among other journals and periodicals, and been given citations for notable achievement by The Best American Short Stories and The O’Henry Awards.

Among the accolades his work has received are a 2001-2002 James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation/Copernicus Society of America and a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award for his short story "Red Lobster." His criticism for the Forward has received a Rockower Award and been nominated for a 2011 Society of Professional Journalists’ Deadline Club Award. He has been awarded 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.

In the 1990s, he was active in New York alternative theatre. Among other accomplishments, 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 Regional Alternative Theatre conference which brought experimental theatre artists from across the US 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 US 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 and did graduate work at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, from which he received an MFA with Honors.

Joshua Furst is an assistant professor at Columbia University MFA Writing Program. He is a founding member of the publishing collective Kristiania. He lives in New York City.