Peter Josyph

Peter Josyph is a New York artist who works concurrently as an author, a painter, an actor-director, a filmmaker, and a photographer.

As an author of literary non-fiction, Peter Josyph has explored various forms of memoir, such as three books about reading novelist Cormac McCarthy; two books of eyewitness encounters in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in Lower Manhattan; a book of conversations with surgeon-author Richard Selzer, as well as a book of Selzer's correspondence with him; and ongoing chronicles, in essay and conversation, of his association with jazz composer and trumpet player Tim Hagans. As a writer of fiction, his ongoing projects are a series of novels and short stories in which the narrator is French painter Henri Matisse, and the Haiku Quintet, a series of semi-autobiographical haiku novels written entirely in verses of 17 syllables. He is also a playwright and screenwriter.

Peter Josyph is the author of Cormac McCarthy's House: Reading McCarthy Without Walls (University of Texas Press, 2013); The Way of the Trumpet (Boone's Dock Press, 2012); Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy (Scarecrow Press, 2010);Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero (SUNY Press, 2012); What One Man Said to Another: Talks With Richard Selzer (MSU Press, 1994), and, as editor, The Wounded River: The Civil War Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, M.D. (MSU Press), which was featured in American Heritage and was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Along with fellow actor Raymond Todd, Josyph recorded What One Man Said to Another as an unabridged Blackstone Audiobook (2002). Josyph edited, illustrated, and wrote the preface for Letters to A Best Friend (SUNY Press, 2009), a selection of Richard Selzer’s correspondence with him. He wrote the preface for the MSU paperback of Selzer’s Taking the World in for Repairs, and the afterword for the SUNY Press edition of Selzer’s Down from Troy, which he also illustrated.

Josyph’s fiction, personal essays, criticism and interviews have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Lapham’s Quarterly, Chelsea, Newsday, The Southern Quarterly, Salmagundi, The Bloomsbury Review, Library Journal, Twentieth Century Literature, Medical Humanities Review, Journal of Medical Humanities, The Arden, MD, Year One, Paragraph, Antipodes, Southwest American Literature, Studies in Short Fiction, the Cormac McCarthy Journal, and New York Stories. His work has been anthologized in High on the Downs: A Festschrift for Harry Guest; You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy's Knoxville; Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy; Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy; the Four-Way Reader # 1; and Interdisciplinary and Intertextual Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings. His memoir Strictly 53rd Street appears as a booklet in the Grammy-nominated jazz CD The Avatar Sessions (Fuzzy Music, 2010), featuring the music of trumpeter/composer Tim Hagans (three Grammy nominations), with whom Josyph also performs in duets for trumpet and haiku based on Josyph's series of haiku novels, the Haiku Quintet, consisting of: The Way of the Trumpet, London Journal, Stockholm, Heroin Days, and Black Rice. The Way of the Trumpet was nominated for the 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing.

...
Wikipedia