DAVID JOSEPH
Bio
David Joseph is the author of four award-winning collections of short fiction, The Old Men Who Row Boats and Other Stories, I Didn't Know What To Say, So I Just Said Thanks, I Never Knew How Old I Was, and I Wanted To Be A Bluesman. His writing has been published in The Wall Street Journal, LA Times, London Magazine, DoubleTake Magazine, Motherwell, The Smart Set, and Rattle. He is a graduate of Hobart College and the University of Southern California’s Graduate Writing Program, where he was a recipient of the Kerr Fellowship and served as editor for the Southern California Anthology. In 2002, he Co-Founded the Nonprofit organization America SCORES LA, and he received The John Henry Hobart Fellowship for Ethics and Social Justice in 2007. He has taught at Pepperdine University and Harvard University.
Coming this September
PEOPLE I KNOW
David Joseph's fifth collection of short fiction, PEOPLE I KNOW will be released on September 25th. It will be published by Portal 6 Press and available through Amazon.
"Joseph demonstrates remarkable skill in establishing whole worlds with only a few pages.”
KIRKUS REVIEWS
Reviews
PEOPLE I KNOW
Coming this September
INDIES TODAY
INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS
"Savagely succinct and off-the-cuff insightful, People I Know by David Joseph is a potent dose of short-form fiction that pokes at the meaning of minutiae in our lives. From nostalgic recollections of oddball neighbors and tales of youthful innocence to gritty portraits of grief and violent vignettes of small-town life, this is a visceral collage of snapshot experience. At times dissolving the line between poetry and prose, the writing is stark and poignant, revealing the idiosyncrasies and intimacies of human nature with casual storytelling grace. Relatable, vivid, and intricately layered with simple wisdom, this open-hearted offering is a dark-horse knockout of short fiction."
READERS' FAVORITE *****
RReviewed by Priya Mathew for Readers’ Favorite
"The themes running underneath, such as aging, class, quiet prejudice, and the loneliness inside ordinary routines, give the collection more weight. I picked up this book as someone who usually wants two hundred pages and a slow burn, and I left it convinced that David Joseph can do in four hundred words what most novelists need forty pages for."
INDIES TODAY *****
"This witty collection will have readers thinking back on their childhood, remembering dear friends, humming a fond tune, and pondering their own mortality. A great many of these short fictions end in death, often abruptly so. But it doesn’t feel like the author is chasing shock value or indulging in gloom. Instead, he writes like someone who’s watched people closely enough to know that life moves toward endings, sometimes gently, sometimes without warning, but always with certain inevitability. The fictions don’t share much beyond Joseph’s observational brilliance, yet they’re undeniably addictive. A lightning-fast collection about all the ways people act, react, defend, deflect, live, learn, and love, PEOPLE I KNOW is a masterclass in miniature storytelling."
Other Writing
The London Magazine
The Smart Set
Motherwell Magazine
The Wall Street Journal
Fairlight Books
Litro Magazine
Awards and Prizes
David Joseph is the recipient of The Paul Cave Prize for Literature, Next Generation Indie Book Award, and the Independent Press Award. He has been a finalist for the London Independent Story Prize and the William Shakespeare Award. In addition, his book, I Never Knew How Old I Was, was shortlisted for The Hawthorne Prize. In 2024, Readers Digest named I Didn’t Know What To Say, So I Just Said Thanks as one of the 38 Best Short Story Collections of All Time.
