Ed Simon

Public Humanities Special Faculty

Area of Study

Pre-Modern Studies, Creative Writing, Literary and Cultural Studies

Bio

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 the forthcoming Pittsburgh Review of Books, as well as being a contributing editor to 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. In addition to those roles, Simon has been the Creative Nonfiction Editor at Carnegie Mellon University Press since 2024. 

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, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology from Abrams, and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain from Melville House, named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker. Currently he is finishing, among other projects, a defense of purple prose for Princeton University Press and a series of essays about our apocalyptic times for Bloomsbury Academic.

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.

Education

PhD, Lehigh University - 2017

PGCert, University of Strathclyde - 2008 

MA, Carnegie Mellon University - 2007

BA, Washington & Jefferson College - 2006