ABOUT
Maud Newton was born in Dallas, to a southern father and Texan mother. At two, she moved to Miami, Florida, where she was often mistaken for a tourist because of her pallid complexion.
She attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she studied writing with Padgett Powell and Harry Crews, and then, for lack of a better plan, went to law school. Now, having abandoned the practice of law, she lives in New York City, where she works as an editor and writer for Thomson Reuters.
Newton has written about books, writers, and culture for the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Granta, The American Prospect, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post Book World, and Newsday. She is a contributor to NPR’s Books We Like and The Barnes & Noble Review, and a columnist at The Awl.
She received the 2009 Narrative Prize for “When the Flock Changed,” an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, which appeared in Narrative Magazine and was praised by Andrea Walker of The New Yorker. Her “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” a personal essay, won second prize in Narrative’s 2008 Love Story Contest and received positive notices — some in the most unexpected quarters — when it was later anthologized. She was awarded City College’s 2004 Irwin and Alice Stark Short Fiction Prize for an early story, “Regarding the Insurance Defense Attorney.” Her stories and personal essays have also appeared in Granta, Swink, Maisonneuve, and other publications. She discussed her reasons for writing a novel rather than a memoir in a piece for the Los Angeles Times.
Newton started blogging in May 2002 with the aim of meeting others who were passionate about books, culture, and politics. Since then, her site has been praised, criticized, and quoted in The New York Times Book Review, Forbes, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The New York Times, the UK Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, Book Magazine, London’s Evening Standard, The Scotsman, Slate, the Denver Post, Canada’s National Post, and many other publications. For her thoughts on blogging, see Gordon Hurd’s interview for Yahoo! Picks.
She has appeared on BookTV, Talk of the Nation, and Radio Open Source, and recently debated the future of the book with writer, critic, and Agni editor Sven Birkerts as part of the University of Pittsburgh’s Contemporary Writers Series.
Currently, she serves on the Board of Directors for Girls Write Now, a nonprofit organization that pairs professional mentors with at-risk teen girls. She is curating Girls Write Now’s Chapters series at the Center for Fiction.