Joseph Bosco

Joseph Bosco

Born August 30, 1948, in Biloxi, Mississippi, Joseph Bosco’s family moved across the bay to Ocean Springs in time for him to begin the second grade. With his sister Sylvia, his mother Wilma, and his father Frank, he grew up on the beach: his front yard sloped into the Gulf of Mexico, and his back yard dipped into a semi-tropical rain forest. At Ocean Springs High School, Bosco was a star athlete — during his three years as a starter, the Ocean Springs Greyhounds lost only one football game — and a popular class officer while also being the singular “avant-garde” poet/intellectual committed to the civil rights movement within a totally segregated society. After graduating in 1966, he took his lumps and his victories as they came during those strange and wonderful days called the ’60s; he was a father, husband and published poet at 19.

After initially going to Jackson County Junior College (sandwiched between several “sabbaticals” lived to the hilt in Greenwich Village, New York), Bosco received a BFA in Theatre Arts from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1972. He then returned to New York where he met with success as an actor. Scared that he might eventually be called upon to display real talent, not just stage presence and pluck, he returned to the Deep South, settling in New Orleans to write and support a family any way he could.

Bosco’s jobs over the years include stints as an actor, a roustabout on off-shore drilling rigs, a cab driver and “radical poet” in New York City, a restaurant and/or bar manager or owner, a car salesman, a bonded wine consultant, a columnist for a suburban newspaper in the greater New Orleans area, a scout for the Chicago Cubs, and a managing partner of a successful independent film and video production company in New Orleans, where his responsibilities were writing, producing and directing commercials and assorted documentaries.

Bosco went totally freelance as an author and journalist in 1984. Consequently, he found himself living in Los Angeles for most of the last decade of the 20th Century, where he taught at the UCLA Writer’s Program. Bosco ended up being a witness in the O. J. Simpson criminal trial.

While Bosco has written across the literary spectrum, he has particular expertise in chronicling criminal justice cases and issues. Having had the privilege of working with the distinguished Dr. Henry Lee over a number of years, he is one of the most forensically-experienced journalists in America. He has appeared frequently on every major national TV newscast, news talk show, or news tabloid in the industry as an expert criminal trial commentator.

In late August, 2002, Mr. Bosco landed in Xiamen, a beautiful semi-tropical island just off the mainland of the People’s Republic of China, where he is a Visiting Professor of Literature at Xiamen University, one of the Key universities directly under the Ministry of Education in the amazingly dynamic new China.

Bosco has published several nonfiction books and shorter pieces in magazines such as Time, Penthouse, The New York Times Book Review, Writer’s Digest, Buzz, Prevailing Winds, and Coast. He has two fictional works in progress: The Scotch and Marijuana Papers, Book One: Crazy Sorrows, and The Scotch and Marijuana Papers, Book Two: A Sunflower for You.

(Article first posted June 2004)

Related Links & Info

Joseph Bosco’s Scotch and Marijuana Papers.