Mona Simpson

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Mona E. Simpson (born Mona Jandali, June 14, 1957 in Green Bay, Wisconsin) is a novelist and essayist. She was born to an American mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, and a Syrian father, political science professor Abdulfattah Jandali^[1]. She is the younger sister of Steve Jobs, co-founder and current CEO of Apple. Because Jobs was placed for adoption as a baby by their then-unmarried parents, she first met her sibling as an adult. She later took her stepfather's surname, Simpson.

She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Jackson Burgess, Seamus Heaney, Leonard Michaels and Thom Gunn. After receiving a B.A. in English from Berkeley in 1979, she enrolled at Columbia University, where she earned an M.F.A. She worked for Paris Review during this period.

At Columbia she began her first published novel, Anywhere but Here, the story of a turbulent mother-daughter relationship. The book became a bestseller when published by Knopf in 1987, and was subsequently adapted into a film in 1999. Anywhere But Here was followed by The Lost Father and A Regular Guy. She has since published the novel Off Keck Road, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. Excerpts from her new novel My Hollywood have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, and on This American Life.

Simpson is also a contributor to various anthologies and essay collections. She is the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College. She currently lives in Santa Monica, California with her husband Richard Appel and their two children. Appel, a writer for The Simpsons, used his wife's name for Homer Simpson's mother, beginning with the episode "Mother Simpson."

Works

• Anywhere But Here (1986) ISBN 0394552830
• The Lost Father (1992) ISBN 0394589165
• A Regular Guy (1996) ISBN 0679450912
• Off Keck Road (2000) ISBN 0375410104

References

External links

• Random House biography
• [1]Fortune Magazine article