Emily Nemens is stepping down as editor of The Paris Review less than three years after she was named to lead the prestigious New York-based literary magazine.
In a note published Wednesday on the magazine’s website, Nemens wrote about the publication’s mission and the things she’s been proudest of in her time there. Only toward the end of the nearly 600-word post did she reveal that she is leaving to work on her second novel. “Hopefully, eventually, I’ll edit again,” she wrote. “Connecting writers to readers is among the world’s best professions.”
Before joining The Paris Review, Nemens was a co-editor of The Southern Review and lived in Baton Rouge, La. She changed jobs several months after the previous Paris Review editor, Lorin Stein, resigned amid an internal inquiry into allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment.
The Paris Review first appeared in 1953, and before Nemens its only top editors had been Stein, Philip Gourevitch, Brigid Hughes and George Plimpton, a co-founder.
Nemens’s departure is not the only notable recent one at the publication. Nadja Spiegelman, who was named the magazine’s online editor in 2017, is leaving to become the editor in chief of Astra Quarterly, a forthcoming literary review published by Astra Publishing House, which was founded last year. Spiegelman, the daughter of the artist Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, the art director of The New Yorker magazine, is the author of the 2016 memoir, “I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This.”
The New York Review of Books also made recent personnel changes with little public fanfare. Emily Greenhouse announced on Twitter last month that she had been named the editor of the publication. Greenhouse became the co-editor of the magazine with Gabriel Winslow-Yost two years ago. Winslow-Yost remains at the magazine as one of its five senior editors.
Greenhouse also announced other changes at the magazine: The poet Jana Prikryl, formerly a senior editor, is now the executive editor; Daniel Drake is the production editor; and Maya Chung is the associate editor.