Josh Russell

Josh Russell, Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program, has published three novels, three chapbooks of very short prose, and more than a hundred stories and essays. His most recent book is King of the Animals: Stories (LSU Press, 2021).

Russell teaches graduate and undergraduate fiction and nonfiction workshops, and seminars on contemporary prose and the form and theory of fiction. His teaching, research, and creative interests include flash fiction, the novella and novel, historical fiction, literary nonfiction, hybrid forms, DIY publishing, and book arts.

He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel. His books have won the Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal for Literary Fiction and have been finalists for the Townsend Prize (twice), the Binghamton University John Gardner Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.

Russell’s shorter prose has been anthologized in New Micro, The Best Small Fictions, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover, New Stories from the South, French Quarter Fiction, Flash Nonfiction Funny, and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader, and has appeared recently in One Story, Epoch, the New York Times, Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature, DIAGRAM, and Subtropics.

He is associate editor at Five Points and faculty advisor for New South.