Joshua Gidding teaches writing at Highline College, near Seattle. He has also taught at Dowling College, Stony Brook University, Holy Cross, and the University of Southern California. He is the author of Failure: An Autobiography (2007), The Old Girl (1980), and numerous essays and book reviews. He is also the editor of The Ways We Were: Exeter Remembered, 1968 -1972 (2022). His essay “On Not Being Proust: An Essay in Literary Failure,” was listed 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, a psychiatric rehabilitation counselor, who died in 2004.