About
Andrea Simon is a writer and photographer based in New York City. She has worked as an editor, writer, and manager on diverse projects, and was the co-owner of an editorial/production company that specialized in health-related educational materials. For the past several years, she has devoted her efforts to fiction and literary nonfiction, including her published memoir/history, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest, now in a paperback edition; her award-winning historical novel, Esfir Is Alive, re-released in a new edition in 2024; and her novel-in-stories, Floating in the Neversink. Andrea has published numerous stories and essays and has received prestigious literary honors, including the winner of the Ernest Hemingway First Novel Contest, two Dortort Creative Writing Awards, the Stark Short Fiction Prize, the Short Story Society Award, and the Authors in the Park Short Story Writing Contest. More recent honors include: Esfir Is Alive was a 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist and a 2017 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards winner; Floating in the Neversink was the 2020 New York Indie Author Project winner; and Bashert was number one on the list for the 2021 Book Authority’s “Best Holocaust Biography Books of All Time,” and was named Honorable Mention 2023 in the Eric Hoffer Award, Legacy Nonfiction.
Photographing her impressions for many decades, Andrea specialized in archival black-and-white printing, and has moved onto digital images. Her photographs have been published in numerous vehicles and displayed at international galleries.
Andrea holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York where she has taught introductory writing and creative writing. A member of the Story Circle Network (SCN), Andrea has taught an online course on “How to Write About Your Family — and Still Talk to Them Afterwards” and conducted a SCN conference workshop on writing about your mother, which she has converted into an online course called “Writing About Your Mom without Guilt.” That course led to an ongoing group whose work appears in an anthology published in 2024 called Here’s the Story … Nine Women Write Their Lives. Andrea has presented her work at book clubs, schools, synagogues, the 92nd Street Y, genealogy conventions, and reading series. A longtime member of a writing group, Andrea has also mentored many writers. The mother of a grown daughter, Andrea lives in New York with her husband.