Maud Newton

Maud Newton is a writer and critic. Her first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House), is a best book of 2022, according to The New Yorker, NPR, Washington Post, Time, Boston Globe, Esquire, Garden & Gun, Entertainment Weekly, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Chicago Tribune. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Roxane Gay Book Club selection, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's 2023 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. Ancestor Trouble has been called “a literary feat” by the New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by the Boston Globe. It was praised by Oprah Daily, NPR, Vanity Fair, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, and many other publications. Newton also writes personal essays, cultural criticism, and fiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Esquire, Harper's, Narrative, the New York Times Book Review, Harper's Bazaar, Oxford American, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Humanities, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Paris Review Daily and many other publications and anthologies, including Best American Travel Writing and the New York Times bestseller, What My Mother Gave Me. She is a recipient of the Narrative Prize, and the Stark Short Fiction Prize, both for fiction. She has been a Yaddo resident. Newton has discussed the importance of individual acknowledgments of ancestors' complicity in larger cultural harms with NPR's All Things Considered, the New York Times Book Review podcast, WNYC, the Dallas Morning News, and many others. She was born in Dallas, grew up in Miami, and graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in English and law. She has lived in New York City since 1999. She started blogging in May 2002 with the aim of finding others who were passionate about books, culture, and politics, and to establish an informal place to write about her life and family. Within a few years, her site had been praised, criticized, and quoted in the New York Times Book Review, Forbes, New York Magazine, the Washington Post, the UK Times, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, Poets & Writers, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Yorker, Book Magazine, London’s Evening Standard, the Scotsman, Slate, the Denver Post, and Canada’s National Post. For Ancestor Trouble, Newton went searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family—and found that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves. The book is an outgrowth of longstanding preoccupations that she wrote about on her blog. Newton's pronouns are she/her. She is married to the artist Maximus Clarke and acknowledges that she lives on the land of the Lenape people.