THE AUTHOR
Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor-in-Chief for Belt Magazine and a contributing editor at the Montreal Review. He is also an emeritus staff writer at The Millions, which the New York Times has called the “indispensable literary site,” as well as being a monthly columnist for both 3 Quarks Daily and LitHub. Among a coterie of young critics who’ve helped to reinvigorate the form, Simon was mentioned alongside several other writers in novelist Ryan Ruby’s influential Vinduet essay in which he argued that this generation is one in which “criticism is being practiced and received as an art form in its own right.” A 2023 listed notable in The Best American Essays edited by Vivian Gornick, Simon is the author of over a dozen books, including An Alternative History of Pittsburgh from Belt Publishing and Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, a work of illustrated nonfiction released by Abrams. His most recent books are Elysium: An Illustrated History of Angelology, Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost (Ig Publishing) and Relic (Bloomsbury).
His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Aeon, Jacobin, Salon, The New Republic and The New York Times among dozens of others, while his anonymous reviews appear in Publishers Weekly.
Originally a native of Pittsburgh, he has lived in New York City, Boston, Washington DC, and now his hometown again. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University and has taught as a college instructor for two decades, in disciplines including English literature and composition, journalism, rhetoric, religious studies, and political science, at institutions including Point Park University, Duquesne University, Lehigh University, Bentley University, American University, Mt. Aloysius College and Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2022, he has been a proud member of the board for Autumn House Press, the venerable Pittsburgh-based non-profit publisher of fiction, non-fiction, and especially poetry as well as serving on the Advisory Council of the International Poetry Forum, which has sponsored readings in Pittsburgh that include forty Pulitzer Prize winners, twenty-seven U.S. poet laurates, fourteen Academy Award recipients, and nine Nobel Prize winners. He is represented by Jake Lovell of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
ESSAYS 2022 | 2024 Angel (1887) by Abbott Handerson Thayer at Smithsonian American Art Museum
KAFKA REMAINS THE JEWISH PROPHET OF OBLIVION
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL WON'T GO AWAY
ED SIMON AND RANDALL SULLIVAN
ON WRITING DURING CLIMATE CHANGE
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