Josh Weil

Josh Weil is an American author of fiction and a professor of creative writing. Born in Virginia in the 1970s, he received his BA from Dartmouth College and his MFA from Columbia University. He is the author of the novella trilogy The New Valley (2009), which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Virginia Literary Award. His novel The Great Glass Sea (2014) is an ambitious, allegorical novel set in a near-future Russia where a technological megaproject—a series of space mirrors that reflect sunlight onto a lake region to enable continuous agriculture—has transformed society and divided two brothers. The novel won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2015 and received strong critical notices for the ambition of its vision and the beauty of its prose. Weil's work is distinguished by its deep engagement with the American and Russian rural landscape, its concern with technological change and its human costs, and its commitment to portraying working-class and rural lives with full literary seriousness. He teaches at Ohio State University.