Ed Simon: Introducing The Pittsburgh Review of Books

A call for submissions

Hello Vox Populi subscribers!

I want to let you know about a new initiative that I’m working on as part of my role as the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University that I thought you might be interested in. 

I’m working on establishing a new public facing publication intended for an educated non-specialist audience that will be called The Pittsburgh Review of Books (or PRoB). The idea behind this publication is that it will be a venue for public humanities writing by faculty, graduate students, and freelancers both within Pittsburgh and beyond to publish cultural criticism and analyses. As an online publication, PRoB will be very much of Pittsburgh while also looking to the wider world. My intent for PRoB is that it will be similar to the multitude of incredible public humanities sites – N+1, The Baffler, LitHub – that have proliferated over the past generation. My joke is that people should think of this new site as being like The Los Angeles Review of Books, but more overcast. 

We’ve already established partnerships with Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, Autumn House Press, Carnegie Mellon University Press, and the International Poetry Forum. I’m planning on a soft launch in September and a formal one in October. 

If possible, please share my email with any writers that you think might be interested in contributing to the site (or if any of you would be interested as well!), or anyone who might be interested in collaborating. Currently I’m using the email edsimon@pghrev.com, but I’m happy to have folks reach out at my personal (edsimon310@gmail.com) or work emails (esimon@andrew.cmu.edu).

I’d be happy to answer your questions and look forward to hearing from Vox Populi folks! 

Thank you, 

Ed Simon, PhD