Ed Simon is the Executive Director of Belt Media Collaborative and the Editor-in-Chief for Belt Magazine and 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. The fall of 2023 will see the release of his books Elysium: An Illustrated History of Angelology, Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost from Ig Publishing, and Relic from Bloomsbury. Currently he is finishing, among other projects, the first full cultural history of the Faust legend for Melville House publishing.

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. In addition to his writing, Simon has worked with the Franco-American production company Good Hero as a film consultant. As part of his work at Belt, Simon is a Community Partner with the Rust Belt Institute at Ursuline College. 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. 

What Readers Are Saying:

“Good stuff.” – Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. 

“Ed Simon is never boring… in large part, this is because he possess a host of enviable natural talents: a lively but subtle imagination, an obvious passion for literature, sprawling erudition, an attractive wryness of perspective, a touch of the dissolute in his literary persona, and more than his fair share of stylistic panache.” – David Bentley Hart, author of You are Gods.

“Simon’s light touch and depth of knowledge feels akin to what Geoff Dyer or Janet Malcolm do at their best—and yet his voice is entirely his own.” – Daniel Torday, author of The Twelfth Commandment.

“Ed Simon’s writing is bold, norm-defying, and refreshingly heretical.” – Costica Bradatan, author of In Praise of Failure. 

“Between the struggle for religious certitude and stick-in-the-mud atheism is Ed Simon’s honest and authentic exploration.” – Peter Bebergal, author of Strange Frequencies and Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“Ed Simon’s powerful, searching essays are conversant with a startling range of subject matter: Augustine and Whitman, Bob Dylan and Thomas Paine, Catholicism and Cathars, Cotton Mather and Martin Luther. Simon’s mind goes, quite simply, everywhere.” – Tom Bissell, author of The Disaster Artist 

“[Simon] piques your interest with a vision that is like an impossible mashup of William James and George Carlin… equal parts poet, prophet, and philosopher.” – J.C. Hallman, author of The Devil is a Gentleman: Exploring America’s Religious Fringes and B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal

“From dusty reliquaries to Walt Whitman’s odes, from Thomas Paine to Thomas Moore and all across the persistently stubborn landscape of the American religious imagination, Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history.” – Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture and Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church 

“Like William Blake writing The Lives of the Saints or Nietzsche drawing a map to Utopia, Simon succeeds on his own impossible terms.” – Brook Wilensky-Lanford, author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden