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About the Author
Maud Newton is a writer and critic. Her first book, (Random House) , is a best book of 2022, according to , and . It was a selection and Roxane Gay Book Club selection, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's 2023 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. has been called "a literary feat" by the and a "brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation" by the It was praised by , NPR, the , the , and many other publications. Her work has appeared in the , the , the , the , the , the , the , the and many other publications and anthologies, including and the bestseller, Newton has discussed the importance of individual acknowledgments of ancestors' complicity in larger cultural harms with NPR's , the podcast, American Ancestors (New England Historic Genealogical Society) , WNYC, and many others. She has also appeared on BookTV, Talk of the Nation, Radio Open Source, the Poured Over podcast, the Maris Review podcast, and more. Newton received the Narrative Prize and the Stark Short Fiction Prize, both for fiction. Her fiction and essays have been praised by , the online, , the , the online, and others. Newton 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 the , the UK , the , the , the , the , the , the , the the the and Canada's For her debut book, , 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.
