Ed Simon

Public Humanities Lecturer

Area of Study

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

Bio

Ed Simon is Public Humanities Lecturer in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the founding Editor-in-Chief for The Pittsburgh Review of Books, as well as a monthly columnist for  LitHub. At CMU he is also the director of the Steel City Institute for Social Research which programs seminars on theory for the general public through the Carnegie Library as well as being the Creative Nonfiction Editor for Carnegie Mellon University Press. 

A 2023 listed notable in The Best American Essays edited by Vivian Gornick, and a 2026 finalist for the Kukula Award in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from Washington Monthly, 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. His most recent book is Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling (Bloomsbury). Currently he is finishing, among other projects, a defense of purple prose for Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 2026. 

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 other outlets.

Education

PhD, Lehigh University - 2017

PGCert, University of Strathclyde - 2008 

MA, Carnegie Mellon University - 2007

BA, Washington & Jefferson College - 2006