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Emily Nemens

Emily Nemens

Emily Nemens

Emily Nemens is a writer, illustrator, and editor. In 2018, she became the seventh editor of The Paris Review. Previously, she coedited The Southern Review. Raised in Seattle, she earned degrees from Brown University and Louisiana State University. As an illustrator, she’s collaborated with Harvey Pekar and published her work in The New Yorker; her watercolor portraits of every woman in Congress have been featured across the web and on national TV. Her debut novel, The Cactus League, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2020.

 

Photo by James Emmerman

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Editor's Note

Editor’s Note

Months before world events made 2020 a remarkable—and remarkably difficult—­year, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and I had a conversation about something that happened in 1997. That year, The Paris Review dedicated its Spring issue to the theater. The team assembled a tall stack of Art of Theater interviews and held a contest for verse drama. (According to George Plimpton, plenty of submitters were unaware of the verse stipulation, but the editors considered their work all the same, and lucky for us: one of the winners was a young Martin McDonagh.) They published three plays and five interviews, and a magazine that fairly adamantly avoids themed issues had, if not a theme, then an organizing principle for the quarter.