Mona Simpson

Mona E. Simpson (born Mona Jandali, June 14, 1957 in Green Bay, Wisconsin) is a novelist and essayist. She was born to an American mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, and a Syrian father, political science professor Abdulfattah John Jandali. She is the younger sister of Steve Jobs, co-founder and current CEO of Apple. Because Jobs was placed for adoption as a baby by their then-unmarried parents, she first met her sibling as an adult. She later took ... more

Mona E. Simpson (born Mona Jandali, June 14, 1957 in Green Bay, Wisconsin) is a novelist and essayist. She was born to an American mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, and a Syrian father, political science professor Abdulfattah John Jandali. She is the younger sister of Steve Jobs, co-founder and current CEO of Apple. Because Jobs was placed for adoption as a baby by their then-unmarried parents, she first met her sibling as an adult. She later took her stepfather's surname, Simpson. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Jackson Burgess, Seamus Heaney, Leonard Michaels and Thom Gunn. After receiving a B.A. in English from Berkeley in 1979, she enrolled at Columbia University, where she earned an M.F.A. She worked for Paris Review during this period. At Columbia she began her first published novel, Anywhere but Here, the story of a turbulent mother-daughter relationship. The book became a bestseller when published by Knopf in 1987, and was subsequently... less