Josh Garrett-Davis
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About Josh

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Josh Garrett-Davis is a student of America, its cultures and myths, its West, and other things. He was born and raised in South Dakota, attended Amherst College, and then lived in New York City for a long time, completing an MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia University. While in exile back east, he wrote a personal geography of his home region, Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains, published in 2012. In September 2019 he published a collection of critical essays and riffs, What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination.

Josh is juggling several works in progress: He is a PhD candidate in American history at Princeton University, where he is working on a history of American Indian engagements with recording and radio technologies between 1890 and 1970. He is an associate curator at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. He is a member of the collective M12 Studio, which explores culture and art in rural places. And he is the father of a spectacular daughter, a co-production with Marina Libel.


(Photo by Joshua Simpson)