User:Sam Perkins/Brigid Hughes

Brigid Hughes is the founder and executive editor of A Public Space (APS), a non-profit quarterly literary magazine and publisher of books, based in Brooklyn, New York. Before founding APS in 2005, Hughes was editor of The Paris Review.

Hughes joined The Paris Review as an intern in 1995 and worked there until December 2005, serving as managing editor and interim editor following the death of the magazine's founder, George Plimpton in September 2003.

Under Hughes editorship, AOS has gained a reputation for spotting and publishing writers before they become widely known -- National Book Award winner, Jesmyne Ward, whose first published short story, Cattle Haul, appeared in APS in January 2008, being one example. In the magazine's first issue (April 2006), Hughes stated that APS's mission was to be "A literary forum for the stories behind the news, a fragment of an overheard conversation, a peek at the novel the person next to you on the subway is reading, the life you invent for the man in front of you at the supermarket checkout line. Ideas and stories about the things that confront us, amuse us, confound us, intrigue us."

In 2007, Hughes was co-curator with Peter Conroy and Jake Perlin, of Between the Lines arts festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She is a frequent speaker and panelist at literary conferences, including the Lannan Foundation conference in 2010, and the PEN America literary conference, LITERARY QUARTET: TWO ON TWO, in 2014.