Josh Weil was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural Virginia, to which he returned to write the novellas in his first book, The New Valley (Grove, 2009).

A New York Times Editors Choice selection, The New Valley was honored with a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation and won the 2010 New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association.  Weil’s short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, American Short Fiction, Narrative, and Glimmer Train, among other journals; he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Granta Online, and Poets & Writers.  Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright grant, a Writer’s Center Emerging Writer Fellowship, the Dana Award in Portfolio, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. 

As the 2009 Tickner Fellow, Weil is the writer-in-residence at Gilman School in Baltimore, where he is at work on a novel.