Josh English
About
Josh English grew up in a converted barn in the woods of northwest New Jersey. His father was a jeweler who developed early onset Parkinson's in his mid-fifties. His mother was born on a Kibutz in Israel and has spent the last 25 years as a farmer at a community supported garden. He has two sisters
After High School, he spent seven years writing and playing music. In that time he recorded and pressed three albums and drove around the country and the east coast doing small shows and selling CD's from the trunk of his car. Meanwhile he worked a range of jobs from food service to warehouse work to fedex driver to caretaker.
At 25 he returned to school. He did his undergrad at Montclair University and his MFA at the University of South Carolina. Currently he is a PhD candidate at University of Houston. He is an Inprint C Glen Cambor Fellow, and a winner of the Donald Barthleme Prize and the James Dickey Award. His first manuscript, Hypothesis, has been a finalist for the Alice James Prize, the Saturnalia Prize, New Issues Prize and other.
His poetic and critical work both lean toward interdisciplinarity, with a particular attention to sciences and art theory. He writes poetry, non-fiction, and hybrid work. He also engages in visual and video art. His current project takes up his father's early onset parkinson's diagnosis, and considers it at the intersection of eco- and formal- poetics. At the moment he's thinking a lot about indexes.
He's worked as an editor for over seven years, including serving as co-founding and managing editor for Oxidant|Engine and poetry editor for Gulf Coast. Currently, he's the head editor for The Newsletter at Public Poetry. Public Poetry is a Houston, TX based non-profit that works to develop community poetry events, including the Houston Public Library's monthly poetry reading series, and REELpoetry: An International Poetry-Film Festival.
