Mona Simpson. Photo: Gaspar Tringale.

The Paris Review Foundation is delighted to announce the appointment of Mona Simpson as the magazine’s new publisher. Simpson succeeds Susannah Hunnewell, who passed away in June 2019. Previous publishers include founding publisher Sadruddin Aga Khan, Drue Heinz, Deborah Pease, and Antonio Weiss.

Simpson began her involvement with The Paris Review as a work-study student in Columbia’s M.F.A. program, eventually joining the staff as a senior editor, serving in that capacity for five years. During her tenure, Simpson convinced George Plimpton to provide the staff with health insurance for the first time, and she discovered several unknown authors in the magazine’s slush pile, a number of whom have gone on to become significant voices in contemporary literature.

During her time as an editor, Simpson completed her first novel, Anywhere but Here. She left the magazine for Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship. She held the Samuelson Levy Chair in Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she is now a visiting writer, while on the faculty at UCLA. She has been a member of the board of directors and the editorial committee of The Paris Review since 2014.

Simpson is the author of six acclaimed novels, which have been widely translated. A film was adapted from one of them. She’s received many awards for her fiction, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA award, the Whiting Award, the Lila Acheson Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, the Heartland Prize, the Mary McCarthy Prize, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This year, her short story “Wrong Object,” first published in Harper’s, is included in the Best American Short Stories anthology. Her seventh novel, The Humble House, will be published next year.

We welcome Mona into her expanded role with The Paris Review!