Joshua Gidding grew up in Los Angeles, and currently teaches writing at Highline College, near Seattle. He has also taught at Stony Brook University, Dowling College, Holy Cross, and the University of Southern California. He holds a BA in classics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in English from USC. Before entering academia he worked for many years as a script-reader for various Hollywood studios, and also as a security guard, busboy, and short-order cook. He is the author of Failure: An Autobiography (Cyan Books, 2007), The Old Girl (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), and numerous essays and book reviews. He is also the editor of The Ways We Were: Exeter Remembered, 1968-1972 (PEA Class of '72, 2022). His essay "On Not Being Proust: An Essay in Literary Failure" was listed as a "Notable Essay" in Best American Essays 2009. He lives in Seattle with his second wife, Julie Tower Gilmour, an interfaith chaplain. He has a son, Zachary, by his first wife Diane, who died in 2004.