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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 written 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. In fiction, he has written 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. He is also a playwright and screenwriter.
Peter Josyph is the editor or The Wounded River: The Civil War Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, M.D. (MSU Press, 1993), which was featured in American Heritage and was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. 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; Interdisciplinary and Intertextual Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings; and Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes. 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, 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.
Recent articles include "Now Let's Talk About The Sunset Limited" in the spring 2012 Cormac McCarthy Journal; "A Walk with Wesley Morgan Through Suttree's Knoxville" in the winter 2011 Appalachian Heritage, which also features Josyph's photographs., [1] and Oath of Office: A Conversation with Richard Selzer, in the fall 2009 Lapham's Quarterly. [2] Josyph is also the author of an illustrated monograph, From Yale to Canton: The Transcultural Challenge of Lam Qua and Peter Parker (Smithtown Township Arts Council, 1992).
Josyph has two publications forthcoming in 2018: a fourth collection of essays and conversations about Cormac McCarthy called The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: The Counselor; and Glanton's Horse, both published by Priola House.
Josyph has lectured in the Program for Humanities in Medicine at Yale University; as a regular keynote for the Cormac McCarthy Society; for the department of American Studies at the University of Miami; for the English, Cinema, Theatre, and Mass Communications Departments, and for the Alumni Association, at Texas Tech; for the Civil War Roundtable; for the State University of New York at Stony Brook; for Alma College in Michigan; for Berea College in Kentucky; for the New York Council for the Humanities; for the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney; for the Witlliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos; for Hutton House at LIU Post; and as a virtual speaker on Creative Non-Fiction at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and for the CAPITAL Centre at the University of Warwick, England. Josyph has been a resident of the Djerassi Foundation; the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation; Centrum Foundation; the Millay Colony; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; the John Steinbeck Room; the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center; the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers (Scotland); and he has been a Knight Fellow at Yaddo. He held a talk on Cormac McCarthy at the Wittliff Collections. [3] At Hutton House Lectures on the campus of LIU Post, he hosts an ongoing series of seminars on cinema adaptations of literature.
For seven years Josyph was artist-in-residence at the Smithtown Township Arts Council, where he won the Partnership Award from the Association of New York Arts Councils and a grant from the New York Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. His work as a painter has made him a New Yorker Talk of the Town and a Fellow of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He has had solo exhibitions in New York; in Texas; in California; in Washington, D.C.; in Baden-Baden and in Heidelberg, Germany, where for two decades his dealer has been Galerie Signum Winfried Heid. Solo exhibitions include the New York State Vietnam Memorial Gallery; the Well of the Legislative Office Building in Albany, New York; the Rotunda of the Canon Office Building of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.; the historic landmark Central Savings Bank (now Apple Bank) on Broadway in Manhattan; the historic landmark Mills Pond House in St. James, New York; and he has exhibited at the New-York Historical Society.
Josyph's ongoing series of works on paper, Cormac McCarthy’s House, has exhibited at the Kulturens Hus in Luleå, Sweden; at the CAPITAL Centre in Warwick, England; at the Centennial Museum in El Paso, Texas; and at the Longwall Gallery of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center in Berea, Kentucky. The series is the subject of a memoir called "Cormac McCarthy’s House" in the book of that title (University of Texas Press), and a film of that title, directed by Peter Josyph and Raymond Todd. [4] His series All the Pretty Horses: A Tribute exhibited at the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center in March – June 2013. His series The Lost Blood Meridian Notebook exhibited in Australia at the historic Female Orphan School of the University of Western Sydney in summer 2014.
Josyph has collaborated with painter, poet, and theatre director Kevin Larkin on numerous exhibitions, such as Portrait of an American Town and, as Josyph & Larkin, an ongoing series of found-object assemblages called Lives of the Saints, which became a major installation in the historic Church of the Advent on Broadway in Manhattan, including a 40-foot altarpiece, St. Jerome in His Study. Josyph & Larkin have also issued Lives of the Saints as correspondence art in a series of limited edition postcards including The Conversion of Mary Magdalene and St. Genet. Their work is the subject of a monograph by Raymond Todd, Josyph and Larkin: X-Men of Art (ImaginArts, 1994). Josyph's monograph, Kevin Larkin: The Genuine Article (emPublishing, 1989), features conversations with Larkin about his work, and Josyph wrote the text for the exhibition catalogues Kevin Larkin: The Immortal Chant ($3 Seat Productions, 2010), and Kevin Larkin: The Justice of Noon ($3 Seat Productions, 2012). He also illustrated two collections of poetry by Larkin: The Immortal Chant ($3 Seat Productions, 2009), and A Portable Man ($3 Seat Productions, 2012). In 2009 Larkin's exhibition The Immortal Chant featured a multimedia installation based around Josyph's memoir Smoking A Picasso. In 2010 Larkin directed an adaptation of Josyph's verse monologues, Book of Thieves, and in 2010 he directed Josyph's A Tell Tale Poe with Raymond Todd as Edgar Allan Poe, and the Hagans/Josyph performance of Josyph's The Way of the Trumpet. In November 2012 Larkin directed Josyph's play The Last Colored Lightbulb in Louisiana at B.J. Spoke in New York. In 2013, Alexander Larkin directed The Last Colored Lightbulb in Louisiana along with Josyph's Of Course December at the Rose Theatre in New York.
Josyph's art and photography have been used on posters, book covers, and CDs, including The Kennedy Suite by the Cowboy Junkies (Latent Recordings, 2013); The Moon Is Waiting by Tim Hagans (Palmetto, 2011); The Avatar Sessions by Tim Hagans (Fuzzy Music, 2010); [5] Close to So Far by the Joe LoCascio Trio (Heart Music, 2002); They Rode On: Blood Meridian and the Tragedy of the American West (Cormac McCarthy Society Press, 2013); You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy's Knoxville (Cormac McCarthy Society Press, 2012); John Sepich's Notes On Blood Meridian (Ballarmine College Press, 1993; rev. University of Texas Press, 2008); [6] and the Portuguese translations, by Paulo Faria, of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (Relógio D'Água, 2009); Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West (Relógio D'Água, 2010); The Crossing (Relógio D'Água, 2012); and Child of God (Relógio D'Água, 2014). His photographs and illustrations have been published in the Winter 2011 issue of Appalachian Heritage, in the 2010, 2011, and 2013 issues of The Cormac McCarthy Journal, in the June 2011 issue of the Portuguese literary magazine LER, [7] and in the December 2010 and August 2013 issues of Ipsilon. His photographs of Dallas marking the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination illustrate articles by Portuguese author Paulo Faria in two November issues of the Lisbon newspaper Publico. In September 2011, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Josyph's Lost Worlds of September 11, an exhibition of photographs and texts, showed at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, Texas.
For 12 years Josyph was Artistic Director of Victory Rep in New York, where he wrote fifty plays and where he acted and directed continually. In addition to the plays of Pinter, Chekhov, and Ibsen, Victory Rep performed originals by Josyph and his adaptations of classic American authors such as Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and surgeon-author Richard Selzer. For two years Josyph played Henry David Thoreau in a one-man play, An Hour at Walden. In January 2014 he played White in Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited at the Weisiger Theatre in Danville, Kentucky, directed by Patrick Kagan-Moore.
Josyph is President of the Board of the Michele Brangwen Dance Ensemble, an innovative company that conjoins live original music with new choreography, dance improvisation, film and spoken word. MBDE has based a series of dances on Josyph's series of large expressionist canvases called Louie's, Key West, and another series of dances on his book of dream poetry called Collapse and Calypso. Josyph directed a series of short films for MBDE's internet channel Artcast, as well as a serial feature called No Standing in St. Petersburg.
In 2001, Josyph co-directed the documentary Acting McCarthy: The Making of Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses (Lost Medallion Productions, 2000), which examines the art of acting in relation to literature (the work of Cormac McCarthy), with actors Matt Damon, Bruce Dern, Henry Thomas, Lucas Black, Miriam Colon, Julio Mechoso; screenwriter Ted Tally; DPs Fred Murphy and Barry Markowitz; and director Billy Bob Thornton. The documentary is co-directed with Raymond Todd.
Josyph's feature documentary Liberty Street: Alive at Ground Zero (Lost Medallion Productions, 2005) is based on a year and a half of filming in Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. It won two awards in American film festivals and is a companion to his book Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero. Josyph directed a related short film, I've Got to Go Fix My Flags (Lost Medallion Productions, 2013), also shot at Ground Zero. [4] His film No Standing in St. Petersburg starring Elena A. Shadrina, Anna Istomina, Raymond Todd, and Kevin Larkin, is airing between 2013 and 2018 at his YouTube channel, [4] where he also reads the poetry of Whitman, Keats, Swift, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, and Shakespeare. His film Hell, starring Josyph and Raymond Todd, is also viewable at Josyph's website. [8] His series of jazz films includes G Is Good, a short about night in New York featuring trumpeter Tim Hagans and tabla player Badal Roy; Bad at the Pad, a series of improv duets with Tim Hagans and Jukkis Uotila; Free With Lee, featuring sax legend Lee Konitz in conversation with Tim Hagans; Man With Saxophone: Lee Konitz Back in Boston, with Lee Konitz and pianist Dan Tepfer; and two tributes to jazz legend Bob Belden: Killer Instinct, and 28 If, both featuring Tim Hagans and other members of the original Animation/Imagination band. [4] Josyph also directed a series of short films featuring the Tim Hagans Quartet called Tim Hagans at Dizzy's.
Timothy Francis Robbins is an American actor, director and producer. He is best known for portraying Andy Dufresne in the film The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and for winning an Academy Award and Golden Globe award for his role in Mystic River (2003) and another Golden Globe for The Player (1992).
Cormac McCarthy was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. He was known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.
Tim Hagans is an American jazz trumpeter, arranger, and composer. He has been nominated for three Grammy Awards: Best Instrumental Composition for "Box of Cannoli" on The Avatar Sessions ; Best Contemporary Jazz Album for Animation*Imagination ; and Best Contemporary Jazz Album for Re-Animation.
Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic historical novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified under the Western, or sometimes the anti-Western, genre. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.
No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, who had originally written the story as a screenplay. The story occurs in the vicinity of the Mexico–United States border in 1980 and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert back country. Owing to the novel's origins as a screenplay, the novel has a simple writing style that differs from McCarthy's other novels. The book was adapted into a 2007 Coen brothers film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
No Country for Old Men is a 2007 American neo-Western crime thriller film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel of the same name. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin, the film is set in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas. The film revisits the themes of fate, conscience, and circumstance that the Coen brothers had explored in the films Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), and Fargo (1996). The film follows three main characters: Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), a Vietnam War veteran and welder who stumbles upon a large sum of money in the desert; Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a hitman who is sent to recover the money; and Ed Tom Bell (Jones), a sheriff investigating the crime. The film also stars Kelly Macdonald as Moss's wife, Carla Jean, and Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells, a bounty hunter seeking Moss and the return of the $2 million.
Thomas Joseph McCarthy is an American filmmaker and actor who has appeared in several films, including Meet the Parents and Good Night, and Good Luck, and television series such as The Wire, Boston Public and Law & Order.
The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and almost all life. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.
The Omni Grove Park is a historical resort hotel on the western-facing slope of Sunset Mountain within the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Asheville, North Carolina. This hotel was visited by various Presidents of the United States mentioned below.
José Gil is a Portuguese philosopher.
The Gardener's Son: A Screenplay is the print screenplay for the 1977 television film of the same name, written by Cormac McCarthy. The book was first published in September 1996 by Ecco Press. Based on an 1876 murder case in the mill town of Graniteville, South Carolina, the story follows Robert McEvoy—an embittered young man whose father works as a gardener for the mill-owning Gregg family—as a chain of events lead to his killing of James Gregg and an ensuing trial.
Todd McCarthy is an American film critic and author. He wrote for Variety for 31 years as its chief film critic until 2010. In October of that year, he joined The Hollywood Reporter, where he subsequently served as chief film critic until 2020. McCarthy subsequently began writing regularly for Deadline Hollywood in 2020.
Scott Haze is an American actor. He is known for his role in the 2013 film Child of God, as well as Thank You for Your Service (2017), the 2021 western Old Henry, and others. He also directed Mully (2015), a documentary on the African humanitarian Charles Mully.
The Counselor is a 2013 crime thriller film directed by Ridley Scott and written by Cormac McCarthy. It stars Michael Fassbender as the eponymous Counselor as well as Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt. The film deals with themes such as greed, mortality, love, and trust in the context of the Mexican drug trade. The extremely violent and bloodthirsty activities of drug cartels are depicted as the Counselor, a high-level lawyer, gets involved in a drug deal around the troubled Ciudad Juarez, Mexico/Texas border area.
Child of God is a 2013 American crime drama film co-written and directed by James Franco, and starring Scott Haze, based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. It was selected to be screened in the official competition at the 70th Venice International Film Festival and was an official selection of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. The film made its United States premiere at the 51st New York Film Festival and then was screened at the 2013 Austin Film Festival.
José Iturbi Báguena was a conductor, pianist and harpsichordist, from Valencia, Spain. He appeared in several Hollywood films of the 1940s, notably playing himself in the musicals Thousands Cheer (1943), Music for Millions (1944), Anchors Aweigh (1945), That Midnight Kiss (1949), and Three Daring Daughters (1948), his only leading role.
Cormac McCarthy was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. McCarthy has written twelve novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres, as well as multiple short-stories, screenplays, plays, and an essay.
"The Kekulé Problem" is a 2017 essay written by the American author Cormac McCarthy for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). It was McCarthy's first published work of non-fiction. The science magazine Nautilus first ran the article online on April 20, 2017, then printed it as the cover story for an issue on the subject of consciousness. David Krakauer, an American evolutionary biologist who had known McCarthy for two decades, wrote a brief introduction. Don Kilpatrick III provided illustrations.
The Cormac McCarthy Journal is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal of literary criticism dedicated to the study of the American author Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023). The journal launched in 2001 as an annual publication of the Cormac McCarthy Society. Since 2015, issues are published on a biannual basis by the Penn State University Press.
The Gardener's Son is a 1977 American historical crime drama television film directed by Richard Pearce and written by Cormac McCarthy. Set in the company town of Graniteville, South Carolina during the Reconstruction era, the story is based on a real historical 1876 murder and subsequent trial. The Gardener's Son dramatizes the tensions between the working-class McEvoy family and the wealthy Greggs, whose patriarch owned the town cotton mill. Brad Dourif stars as Robert McEvoy, a disgruntled amputee who in 1876 killed James Gregg. The plot presents the complex material and psychological conditions for the crime while leaving the ultimate question of a single motive undecidable.
