S. T. Joshi

In August 2014, Joshi opposed the campaign to change the World Fantasy Award statuette from a bust of Lovecraft to one of African-American author Octavia Butler. As a person of colour, Joshi has been an ardent defender of Lovecraft's reputation and of the necessity to hold a balanced perspective on Lovecraft's racist attitudes given the general tenor of social attitudes during the times in which Lovecraft lived. Joshi returned his several World Fantasy Awards in protest at the decision to no longer utilise Gahan Wilson's statuette of Lovecraft as the award. The World Fantasy Award has since been changed to one of a leafless tree in front of a moon in bronze designed by sculptor Vincent Villafranca.

In 2011, Joshi became editor-in-chief of The American Rationalist magazine, which he edited for some years before changes at the magazine resulted in the discontinuation of his involvement.

Joshi was general editor of Cthulhu Mythos works from Perilous Press, including works by Michael Shea and Brian Stableford. The first publication was Shea's Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (2009), with Stableford's volume titled The Womb of Time (two Mythos novellas).

In 2006 he published The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong, which criticized the political writings of such commentators as William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, David and Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol and William Kristol, arguing that Americans have become steadily more liberal.

The Modern Weird Tale examines modern writers, including Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, T. E. D. Klein and others, from a similar viewpoint. The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004), includes essays on Dennis Etchison, L. P. Hartley, Les Daniels, E. F. Benson, Rudyard Kipling, David J. Schow, Robert Bloch, L. P. Davies, Edward Lucas White, Rod Serling, Poppy Z. Brite and others. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (published in two volumes, 2012 by PS Publishing) is a history of supernatural fiction from Gilgamesh.

Joshi edited the five-volume set of Lovecraft's Collected Essays issued by Hippocampus Press from 2004 to 2006. He edited two annotated volumes of Lovecraft's best work for Dell books (the second with Peter H. Cannon). He and David E. Schultz edited the collected poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, issued by Hippocampus Press (3 volumes, 2007–2008) and the collected poetry of George Sterling (3 volumes, 2013).

Joshi published God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003), an anti-religious polemic against various writers including C. S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, William F. Buckley, Jr., William James, Stephen L. Carter, Annie Dillard, Reynolds Price, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Guenter Lewy, Neale Donald Walsch and Jerry Falwell. It is dedicated to theologian Robert M. Price.

Currently, he lives in Seattle, Washington. Joshi married Leslie Gary Boba on September 1, 2001. They divorced in December 2010. He married again to Mary Krawczak Wilson in 2014.

Joshi has published on atheism, including Documents of American Prejudice (1999), an annotated collection of American racist writings; In Her Place (2006), which collects written examples of prejudice against women; and Atheism: A Reader (2000), which collects atheistic writings by Antony Flew, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, Gore Vidal and Carl Sagan, among others. An Agnostic Reader, collecting pieces by Isaac Asimov, John William Draper, Albert Einstein, Frederic Harrison, Thomas Henry Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, Corliss Lamont, Arthur Schopenhauer and Edward Westermarck, was published in 2007.

In 1987, Joshi became the fifth Official Editor of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. He has continued to be the OE of this amateur press association for upwards of 30 years.

Joshi has edited Lovecraft Studies (1979–2001) and Studies in Weird Fiction (1986–2005), both published by Necronomicon Press; and Studies in the Fantastic (2008–09), published by the University of Tampa Press. He is editor of Weird Fiction Review (Centipede Press; 2010), and the Hippocampus Press journals Spectral Realms (from 2014); Lovecraft Annual (from 2007); Nemesis (from 2016). He was formerly co-editor of Dead Reckonings (from 2007).

Joshi discovered the work of Lovecraft at age 13 in a public library in Muncie, Indiana. He also read L. Sprague de Camp's biography of Lovecraft, Lovecraft: A Biography, on publication in 1975, and began thereafter to devote himself to Lovecraft. This devotion led him to decline offers from Yale and Harvard so that he could attend Brown University. He received a B.A. (1980) and M.A. (1982) in classics. After graduating, he undertook additional graduate school at Princeton University, from 1982 to 1984.

Sunand Tryambak Joshi (born June 22, 1958) is an American writer, musician, critic and award-winning scholar whose work has largely focussed on weird and fantastic fiction, especially the life and work of H. P. Lovecraft and associated writers. Joshi is a lifelong scholar and editor of H.P. Lovecraft and restored Lovecraft's texts for Arkham House. He has published a lengthy biography of H. P. Lovecraft, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2 vols). Additionally, Joshi has been a prolific editor of works of weird fiction by various authors and a historian of the field across a number of volumes. He has also written extensively on atheism and rationalism, as well as forms of prejudice including sexism and racism. Joshi lives with his wife, Mary Krawczak Wilson, in Seattle, Washington.