I’m looking forward to talking with Lee Hawkins, author of I Am Nobody’s Slave, for the first-ever McNally Jackson Book Festival! In conversation, we’ll explore the complexities of family history and the intergenerational legacies we carry. We’ll discuss race, inheritance, trauma, and resilience—and how confronting the past can offer hope for future generations. June 3, 6:30 pm, South Street Seaport. . . .
For the Art & Kinship installment in my latest newsletter, I write about Laila Lalami’s chilling new novel, The Dream Hotel, and the author reveals that her mother’s childhood in a Moroccan orphanage may have influenced the book.
I’ve renamed my newsletter from Ancestor Trouble — still a focus and preoccupation — to Meditations on Kinship, which better reflects the breadth of my thinking and feeling and seems like a capacious home going forward. After considering other options, I’m staying on Substack for now. I’m unpersuaded that the alternatives are guaranteed to avoid platforming hate speech, but they . . .
I was surprised and delighted to discover a generous review of Ancestor Trouble by Deanna Korte in the latest issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Here’s an excerpt: Maud Newton, in a fascinating author debut, shows readers that our ‘obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves.’ Newton… takes the reader on a journey of genealogical exploration, . . .
“Rapture Basement,” the first short story I’ve written in well over a decade, is out from Narrative Magazine today. It arrived in a great rush this summer, and I think of it as a kind of fictional fraternal twin to my Baffler essay, “Taking T for Jesus.”