Nina Simon Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Nina Simon is an American published author born on July 15, 1981 in Los Angeles, California. She has also been an educator, a museum director, and an exhibition curator.

Nina says that she has always enjoyed writing. When she was in college, she studied electrical engineering during the day and during the night was a slam poet. Nina graduated from Worcester Polytechnical Institute with a Bachelors in electrical engineering and mathematics.

She worked at NASA for a brief amount of time, where she was designing interactive exhibits. She would go on to become a museum director, serving as the executive director for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for seven years from 2012 to 2019.

In addition, she has also served as the Tech Museum of Innovation’s Curator in San Jose, California, and worked in DC at the International Spy Museum as its Experience Development Specialist. She has also worked at the University of Washington’s Museology Program as an adjunct professor. There she was an instructor on a course regarding social tech in exhibition design.

For much of her career, the author worked as an exhibition designer and an independent consultant. Through this work she was able to exercise an expert eye on all things regarding gaming, social technology, and participatory design. She has worked with many different cultural centers and museums globally.

She has also been part of advisory committees for AAAS and IMLS projects that were all about the future of libraries and museums. Nina is also known for being a public speaker, having spoken to different audiences over the years about such topics as programming philosophy as well as the participatory audience. She was also the keynote speaker for the 2012 AFTA/National Arts Marketing Project Conference.

Nina would write two nonfiction books that were all about the process of creating cultural institutions who are participatory and relevant. Her real job was the nonprofits and then she would write on the side when she had time.

Later, her mother got sick. Nina decided to leave her job so that she had the time to care for her. As a way to cope and escape, she turned to fiction more often. She shared a love of mysteries with her mother, and so Simon decided to try writing one herself out personally and based the hero detective character on her mother. The author’s mother eventually improved and Nina is happy to spend her time writing, reading, and taking care of her family.

Nina resides in the Santa Cruz mountains off of the grid. Her work has appeared on TEDx, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal.

She is the founder of OF/BY/FOR ALL, a non-profit organization. She serves as a board member for The Center for the Future of Museums. She is the principal of Museum 2.0, a design firm that works with libraries, museums, and cultural institutions internationally to come up with programs that can be educational as well as exhibitions driven by audiences. She also writes as a Museum 2.0 blog and a column for Museum Magazine.

Nina is the recipient of the Nancy Hanks Memorial Award in 2012 for the American Alliance for Museums. The author has also been picked as a Museum Visionary by Smithsonian Magazine and as Woman of the Year by the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce for 2017. She was given an Ashoka Fellowship in 2019 and was described as one of the most ‘powerful and influential’ 50 people working in nonprofit arts.

Mother-Daughter Murder Night is the first novel from author Nina Simon. It is a best-selling mystery and A Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection that revolves around three characters, a mother, a teen girl, and a grandmother who come together as a group to try and figure out who murdered a naturalist after their body was washed up in Monterey Bay. She has also written the books The Participatory Museum and the book The Art of Relevance.

The Participatory Museum is an intriguing book from Nina Simon that revolves around something that she knows better than many others and sits squarely in a world that she both understands and commands.

Visitor participation is a huge topic when it comes to everything form libraries, science centers, art galleries, museums, and cultural organizations. The question becomes how will your institution ‘do’ visitor participation, and well?

This is a guide to how others can work with visitors and community members in order to lead to making cultural institutions more essential places that are also relevant and dynamic. Here Nina combines both case studies and innovative techniques of design to make a case for why participatory practice is so important.

Whether you’re a museum director, library employee, someone who directly works with the concepts described in this book or not at all, Nina Simon has certainly crafted an intriguing nonfictional book that anyone with an interest in this subject can appreciate.

Mother-Daughter Murder Night is the first fictional book from author Nina Simon. This is an enticing mystery story that was picked as a best selection of 2023 by CrimeReads, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Library Journal. If you have been looking for something unique and want a good who did it type of mystery to dig into, check this book out!

Nina acknowledges that the novel was written partly as a love letter to her mother, who had endured a major health crisis. She intended as a way that she could connect to her as well as comfort and entertain her.

When it comes to family, something that can always be counted on to bring them all together is a murder being pulled off next door. This about a trio of sleuths that are mother, daughter, and grandmother, all working together to try and catch a killer.

Lana Rubicon is a business woman who lives a fast paced life. She is confident, with her intelligence and her taste to back her up as well as the evidence of being successful: her real estate empire in Los Angeles.

However, she quickly finds herself trapped north of the city three hundred miles in a coastal town with Beth, her grown daughter, and Jack, her granddaughter. Lana quickly finds herself dealing with the boredom of nature and wondering whether all of this this dullness is going to take her out quicker than the cancer.

Jack is a small kid but also independent, and is out kayaking when she finds a dead body. She herself becomes a suspect in the ensuing investigation into the murder. Just like that the Rubicon women are part of this whole thing.

Beth believes that Lana should focus on healing and getting better, but Lana has other ideas. She’s going to get out there and prove she’s still strong by finding the murderer– shortly after pulling on her wig to do so. Beth and Jack agree to help her. But when the three set out to solve a mystery, will they find out that there’s more that they are dealing with than they originally thought?

By depending on each other, they might just get through this. Can these ladies catch a killer? Read Mother-Daughter Murder Night to find out!

One Response to “Nina Simon”

1. Diane Dunn: 3 weeks ago

   THANK YOU for bringing this author to my attention. First is The Art of Relevance (and a copy to my grandson who is gettig a Masters in Social Work also has a BA in Philosophy–he will LOVE this). Next will be her fiction. SO happy to find her.

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