185 Nassau Street
110 Stewart Film Theater

Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University

Moderator

April Alliston
Professor of Comparative Literature

Panelists

David Adams Cleveland ’74
Writer and Art Historian

Eric Simonoff ’89
Partner, WME

Clare Beams ’04
Fiction Writer; Faculty at Randolph College MFA Program

Morgan Simone Jerkins ’14
Author; Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton

Moderator

April Alliston
Professor of Comparative Literature

April Alliston works mainly at the intersections of the fields of 18th-century studies, gender studies, and the history and theory of the novel. An ongoing study explores the relationship between European gender conventions and the origins of the modern novel, arguing that the early novel, far from affirming Enlightenment individualism, connects new philosophical skepticism about interiority and sense experience with archaic social anxieties around female fidelity. She is also currently working on a biography of James Fenimore Cooper, co-authored with Pamela J. Schirmeister of Yale University. Support for her research has included fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as an Old Dominion Professorship in the Princeton University Council of the Humanities.

Panelists

David Adams Cleveland ’74
Writer and Art Historian

David Adams Cleveland is a novelist and art historian. His latest novel, “Gods of Deception,” was described by The Wall Street Journal as “an accomplished and compelling novel of enormous ambition”  and was a 2022 Indies Book of the Year finalist for historical fiction. His third novel, “Time’s Betrayal,” was awarded Best Historical Novel of 2017 by Reading the Past. His art history book, “A History of American Tonalism,” was the silver winner in Art History in the Forward Indies Book of the Year Awards, 2010, and won Outstanding Academic Title 2011 from the American Library Association. The third edition, from Abbeville Press, is one of the best-selling books in American art history — now the standard reference in its field. Cleveland was a regular reviewer for ARTnews, and has written for The Magazine Antiques, the American Art Review and Dance Magazine.

Eric Simonoff ’89
Partner, WME

Eric Simonoff has been a literary agent since 1991 representing a wide range of fiction and nonfiction writers. His clients include Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward P. Jones, Yaa Gyasi, Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Aaliyah Bilal, Buzz Bissinger, Tina Brown, Stacy Schiff, Alton Brown, Stephen Chbosky, Brian Greene, Phil Klay, Christina Baker Kline, Gary Krist, Megha Majumdar, Jonathan Lethem, Ariel Levy, Sarah Lewis, Ben Mezrich, ZZ Packer, Calvin Trillin, Sen. John Fetterman, Mosab Abu Toha, Jessica Shattuck, Trenton Lee Stewart, Karen Thompson Walker, Lea Carpenter and The New Yorker magazine, among others.

Clare Beams ’04
Fiction Writer; Faculty at Randolph College MFA Program

Clare Beams is the author of the novel “The Illness Lesson” (2020) a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and “We Show What We Have Learned” (2016), a story collection that won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her new novel, “The Garden,” has been named a most anticipated book of 2024 by Literary Hub, Bookshop.org, and the Los Angeles Times. She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. Beams was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters and teaches in the Randolph College MFA program.

Morgan Simone Jerkins ’14
Author; Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton

Morgan Jerkins is the author of the New York Times bestseller “This Will Be Undoing,” as well as the critically acclaimed books “Wandering in Strange Lands” and “Caul Baby.” She holds a bachelor’s in comparative literature from Princeton University and an MFA in writing from Bennington College. Jerkins has been named a leader in media in the Forbes “30 Under 30” list and is a two-time National Magazine Award winner for her editorships at Medium and New York Magazine. Her short-form work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Vogue and The Atlantic, among many other publications. She has taught at Pacific University, Leipzig University in Germany, Columbia University and the New School. She is currently based in New York and teaches at Princeton.