The board of the American Agora Foundation, which publishes Lapham’s Quarterly, is pleased to announce the appointment of Paul W. Morris as executive director and publisher.

Morris joins the foundation with significant experience working with literary and educational nonprofits, focusing especially on organizational growth and sustainability, strategic partnerships, and expanding access to books and literary culture.

Morris previously served as general manager of the celebrated arts magazine BOMB, director of literary programs at the PEN American Center, vice president of the Authors Guild, and most recently, executive director of the House of SpeakEasy Foundation, where, among other achievements, he launched an educational arts initiative for underserved schools and communities across the United States that has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts. He sits on advisory committees for the National Book Foundation, the Brooklyn Book Festival, LitNet, and Lit Crawl NYC.

“The appointment of Paul Morris is the result of a six-month-long search,” said Bill Ryan, chair of the American Agora Foundation. “Our entire board could not be more pleased that Paul, who is a truly gifted nonprofit leader, will be joining the foundation and Lapham’s Quarterly. He joins at a moment when our mission of bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past has never been more relevant, or more important, to the national conversation.”

Morris, who starts at Lapham’s Quarterly this month, will be the first person to hold the role of executive director at the American Agora Foundation. He will take over executive responsibilities from founder Lewis H. Lapham, who remains editor of Lapham’s Quarterly and president of the foundation. The magazine’s next issue, Energy, will feature an introductory essay by Lapham, “Power Outage,” and will be released this fall.

In addition to publishing Lapham’s Quarterly, the American Agora Foundation runs a number of high-impact initiatives, including an incarcerated-readers program that distributes the magazine to jails and prisons; an education program that creates curricular materials for K–12 schools and community colleges nationwide; and a public-events series in New York City.

“Paul’s willingness to direct the theater of operations that is Lapham’s Quarterly,” says Lewis H. Lapham, “I count as great and good news, an omen as favorable as the sight of birds rising to the east in Cicero’s Rome. I look forward to working with Paul to expand the audience of the Quarterly and move more copies of the magazine to prison libraries, community colleges, and public-school classrooms.”

According to Morris: “It’s a great privilege to be able to contribute to the legacy of the publication and its visionary founder, whom I’ve long admired. I started reading the Quarterly when it launched over fifteen years ago and have been following Lewis’ writing for twice that time. I am excited to work alongside the magazine’s talented staff, focusing new energy on important programming while ensuring the sustainability of Lewis’ vision.”

Lapham’s Quarterly is a project of the American Agora Foundation, an organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of history. Established in 2007 by former Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis H. Lapham, the magazine embodies the belief that historical consciousness is an asset a democratic republic can ill afford to lose, that history is the root of all education—social and scientific; spiritual, political, and economic. Each issue of the Quarterly focuses on a question of primary and always current concern—recent issues focused on freedom, migration, epidemics, democracy, and climate—by placing the voices and witnesses of the past at the service of the present.