Josh Shoemake

Josh Shoemake was born in Virginia and attended Columbia University, where he studied architecture and literature. He first arrived in Morocco in 1996 and spent three years teaching literature at The American School of Tangier, forming close friendships with Paul Bowles, Mohamed Choukri and other local writers. He served as the first resident headmaster of The American School of Marrakesh from 2003-2008, seeing the school’s first class through to graduation. Now based in Paris and Marrakesh, he has published short stories in several magazines, including The Threepenny Review, as well as a novel, Planet Willie (Opium Books, 2013), about a fallen angel detective with bad earthly habits, and Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Tauris, 2013), a geographical history of the writers and fictional characters who have lived in Tangier, which The Times called “a sure-footed guide to the lore and literature of an enigmatic city,” and the explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison, writing in Country Life, called “a marvellously odd, gossipy romp of a book.”