Joel Zoss

Joel R. Zoss (born February 19, 1944, Easton, Pennsylvania) is an American singer, guitarist, songwriter and award-winning prose author.

At the age of four Zoss moved to Madison, New Jersey, with his family. He attended Montessori School and public kindergarten in Madison and later moved with his family to Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, where he attended Columbia Public School from grades one through seven. He then moved with his family to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he attended Saint Paul Academy, a military day school, for grades eight through ten. He attended the University of Minnesota High School for the first half of eleventh grade, then moved with his family to Providence, Rhode Island, where he completed eleventh grade at Providence’s Classical High School. He attended Moses Brown School in Providence for his twelfth year of high school and graduated from the College at the University of Chicago with a B.A. in English in 1966. Zoss' family moved often because his father’s professional skills were much in demand.

From the age of about ten, the family returned every summer to Martha's Vineyard, where Zoss participated in the Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s, meeting and playing with many of the seminal influences of the day, and began performing with Alex Taylor and his younger brother James Taylor. He has continued to spend time on Martha's Vineyard since childhood.

In the fall of 1966 Zoss began graduate studies in physical anthropology at Columbia University in New York. In New York he also began working with psychologist Richard Alpert (later aka Ram Dass). Their collaborations led him to various studies outside academia and marked the end of his formal education. In 1967 he left the United States. Based in Spain, for the next several years he lived in European capitals and points around the Mediterranean while focusing on prose fiction. Zoss sold his first short story to New Worlds Magazine in 1968 in London, and later that year sold his first novel, Chronicle, to Jonathan Cape and Harper & Row.

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