Maud Newton


Rebecca "Maud" Newton is a writer, critic, and former lawyer born in Dallas, Texas in 1971 and raised in Miami, Florida. Newton's article on "America's Ancestry Craze" was the cover story for the June 2014 issue of Harper's Magazine. Random House acquired Newton's forthcoming book about the science and superstition of ancestry.
She was awarded the 2009 Narrative Prize Fiction, for "When the Flock Changed." Her writing has been published in venues such as Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, Narrative Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, The Awl, Tin House, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, Oxford American, and Humanities Magazine, among others. In 2004 she received the Irwin and Alice Stark Short Fiction Award from the City College of New York and in June 2008 she won second prize in the Narrative Magazine Love Story Contest.
Newton first became known as the founder of an early litblog.

Personal life

Newton was raised in a fundamentalist household. She grew up in Miami. She attended college and law school at the University of Florida. In 1999 she moved to Brooklyn and since 2016 she has resided in Queens. She has written about her father's racism.