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 won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New Writers Award from the GLCA; and a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation. 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, Oxford American and Poets & Writers.  Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright grant, a Tickner Fellowship from Gilman School, a Writer’s Center Emerging Writer Fellowship, the Dana Award in Portfolio, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences.

He is currently the fall 2010 writer-in-residence at The James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, where he is at work on a novel.