• by Melynda Fuller , April 9, 2018

Last week legendary literary magazine The Paris Review announced Emily Nemens, co-editor of The Southern Review, will become its next editor in chief.

Nemens has been co-editor at The Southern Review since 2013, after graduating from the writing program at Louisiana State University.

In addition to her position as co-editor of The Southern Review, Nemens is a noted writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in N+1, Esquire and The Gettysburg Review. She also runs a popular Tumblr, where she publishes watercolor portraits of women serving in Congress.

Under Nemens' watch over the past year, The Southern Review has won two Pushcart Prizes and two O. Henry Awards, while three short stories were selected for this year’s edition of The Best American Short Stories.

Akash Shah, a Paris Review board member who led the search for a new editor, stated in The New York Times: “[Nemens] literary tastes, her accomplishments, the combination of her work ethic and her sense of collaboration — both with her writers and her staff — make her a really unique package of talent.” 

The Paris Review, which has a staff of 11 full time writers and circulation of approximately 23,000, was co-founded in 1953 by editor and writer George Plimpton, who edited the publication until his death in 2003.

Nemens is the fourth editor to take the helm. Immediately following Plimpton's death, Brigid Hughes took over. She now edits the journal A Public Space. Journalist Philip Gourevitch oversaw the publication from 2005 until 2010, when Lorin Stein was hired.

While Stein is credited with bringing back a lost luster to the literary magazine, he was removed from his position in 2017, following a sexual harassment investigation.

Since then, managing editor Nicole Rudick has been running the publication.