Maud Newton is a writer and critic. Her first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House), was a best book of the year, 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 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. Ancestor Trouble was 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, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, and many other publications.

Newton's work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Esquire, Harper's, Narrative, the New York Times Book Review, Oxford American, Time, Granta, Bookforum, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, 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.

Newton received the Narrative Prize and the Stark Short Fiction Prize, both for fiction. Her fiction and essays have been praised by Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, the New Yorker online, Elle, the New York Times, the Paris Review 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 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 her debut book, 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.