Mona Simpson

Mona Simpson is the author of the novels Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, Casebook, and Commitment. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, she moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. She studied poetry with Seamus Heaney at the University of California, Berkeley, worked as a journalist, and earned an MFA from Columbia University. While in graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. She later served as an editor at The Paris Review while completing Anywhere But Here. Her newest book, The Wrong Girl, will be published by Knopf in the summer of 2027.

Simpson has received numerous honors, including a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Prize, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Mary McCarthy Prize. She lives in Santa Monica, California, with her husband and her dog, Copperfield.