Biography

Josh Pachter was born in 1951 in New York. He earned a BA and an MA, both in Speech, at the University of Michigan. After teaching high school for three years in Michigan and college for two years in Pennsylvania, he moved overseas in 1979 and began teaching a wide range of courses for the University of Maryland’s European Division on American Army, Navy and Air Force bases in England, Germany, Holland, Greece, Spain, Bahrain and Pakistan. He moved back to the US in 1991, and taught at Cuyahoga Community College (where he also advised the student newspaper) and Ashland University, both in northeast Ohio, until the spring of 2006. That fall, he took a full-time position in the communication department at the Prince Frederick campus of the College of Southern Maryland. In March of 2007, the campus’ student association named him one of the two winners of its “Peace Prize” for innovative teaching and dedication to education, and that April the CSM website featured an article about him, which you can read here. In the fall of 2010, he began teaching communication classes full-time at Prince George's Community College.

Meanwhile, Josh returned to the University of Maryland’s European Division for a summer term in Italy in 2001, and since then has taught summers in Germany, Kuwait, and Spain. When he moved to Maryland in 2006, he began teaching communication and film classes for the University of Maryland University College at the College Park main campus, at satellite locations in the southern part of the state, and online.

The beautiful brunette you see in the photo on this website’s home page is Josh’s daughter, Rebecca Jones. Becca, 24, graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a double-major in history and psychology (and a minor in religion) and is now in her third and final year at the University of Arizona Law School. Photos from her early years have been magneted to Josh’s Digital Fridge (and there are other family pictures here). In 1989, artist Frank Hamilton did a touching pen-and-ink portrait of Josh and Becca. In 1994, father and daughter were featured on the cover of the Ohio State University Extension’s annual report. For Father’s Day 2000, Becca drew a lovely reproduction of a painting by Henri Matisse.

The beautiful blonde you see on the home page is Josh's wife Laurie. Laurie earned her BA and MA at the University of Iowa, was a successful freelance writer/editor for the last 10 years, and now works as a communication analyst for a government agency in Washington, DC. Her dog Tessa, a collie/terrier mix, is the only dog Josh has ever not been allergic to in his life, and the three of them enjoy long walks in the woods around their new home in Reston, VA.

Josh is also a writer and editor. His first short story, written when he was 16, appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1968. Since then, he has published over 70 crime stories in magazines and anthologies in the US and around the world. "History on the Bedroom Wall," which Josh and Becca co-authored, appeared in the September/October issue of EQMM. Uitnodiging tot Moord, a collection of 18 of his tales, was published in Holland in 1982. He has edited a dozen anthologies (for publishers in the US, England, Holland, Germany, France, Finland, and Brazil), including the popular Authors’ Choice series, and he’s translated both fiction and nonfiction from Dutch into English. His translation of Janwillem van de Wetering’s short story, “There Goes Ravelaar,” won a special award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986. You can find half a dozen short stories and the first six chapters of his novel, Dutch T(h)reat, here. (See Bibliography for a complete listing.)

If you want to know about Josh’s interests outside the classroom and his family, visit his Links page.

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