Roger L. Simon

ROGER L. SIMON made his living writing novels and screenplays before he took the New Media plunge as co-founder and CEO of the pioneering blog aggregation and news and opinion website PJ Media (formerly Pajamas Media) in 2005. In books, he is best known for his series of the eight Moses Wine detective novels, which have been translated into over a dozen languages and won prizes from the Mystery Writers of America and the Crime Writers of Great Britain. The first Moses Wine novel was The Big Fix, made into a film starring Richard Dreyfuss for which Simon wrote the screenplay, bringing him to Hollywood.

Among his many screenplays are Bustin’ Loose (with Richard Pryor), Scenes from a Mall (with Bette Midler and Woody Allen) and the Paul Mazursky-directed Enemies, A Love Story, for which Simon was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. A Better Life, for which Roger wrote the story, was released in 2011 with its lead actor, Damien Bichir, also nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award. Simon also directed the independent feature Prague Duet, starring Gina Gershon and based on a screenplay he wrote with his wife Sheryl Longin (Dick).

He has taught screenwriting at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and at the American Film Institute. He has also written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Commentary and the New York Post, among many other publications. He is a former president of the PEN Center USA West, former vice-president of the International Association of Crime Writers and a former member of the board of the Writers Guild of America. His first non-fiction book Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown was published by Encounter Books in February 2009. The Party Line—a stage play also written in collaboration with Sheryl Longin and set in Stalinist Russia and contemporary Amsterdam—was just published by The New Criterion in November 2012.

Simon—the only person to be profiled favorably in one lifetime by Mother Jones and National Review—has also been a public speaker, speaking on the topics of the effects of political change on people’s lives, Hollywood and politics, and the rise of New Media. He has appeared on television on the Larry Kudlow Show, Fox and Friends, CNBC, Fox Business and others and is a frequent guest on the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show.

Simon blogs at www.pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama.