News & Media

Starred Review from Kirkus

In a starred review of Ancestor Trouble, Kirkus says “the current wave of interest in genealogy, heredity, family history, and responsibility for past injustices crescendos in a comprehensive work combining personal narrative and reporting,” and calls the book “Exhaustively researched, engagingly presented, and glowing with intelligence and honesty.”

Publishers Weekly Review

The Publisher’s Weekly review of Ancestor Trouble is out! “Newton debuts with a masterful mix of memoir and cultural criticism that wrestles with America’s ancestry through her own family’s complex past. . . . The result is a transfixing meditation on the inextricable ways the past informs the present.”

Bookforum Notice

Thanks to Bookforum for noting the upcoming publication of Ancestor Trouble (next March).

Publishers Weekly Feature

In an Open Book installment for Publishers Weekly, featuring Maud, her agent Julie Barer, and her editor Andrea Walker, Louisa Ermelino calls Ancestor Trouble “a marvel: absorbing, addictive, informative.”

Advance Praise

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis offered praise for Ancestor Trouble in The Boston Globe while in the process of reading a galley of the book. “Fantastic…. well researched, well written, and juicy,” she called it. “I love a good juicy historical book.”

New Website

Thank you to Lorissa Shepstone and the rest of the Being Wicked team for my gorgeous new website, the first complete redesign since 2002.

Cover Reveal

Lit Hub unveiled the cover of my upcoming book, Ancestor Trouble (March 29, 2022), along with some insights from designer Rachel Ake and me.

Prior Media

In the past, my essays and fiction have been praised by Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, the New Yorker online, Elle, the New York Times, the Paris Review online, and others.