Ada Calhoun

Early life

Calhoun grew up on St. Marks Place in New York City’s East Village. She is the only child of art critic Peter Schjeldahl and actress Brooke Alderson. They appear as characters in her book St. Marks Is Dead, which she dedicates to them. She has written in The New York Times Magazine about a childhood fascination with the suburbs. As a teenager, she traveled through India and met Mother Teresa. She changed her name in 1998 to avoid comparison to her father.

Writing

Her book St. Marks Is Dead was published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2015. She wrote an op-ed that fall that explained her anti-nostalgic feelings about cities and change:

When I asked nostalgic people to name the street’s golden era, they cited a range of years — often falling between 1960 and 1982, but sometimes 1945, or 1958, or 2012. A Vassar student told me that St. Marks Place died with the fairly recent closing of the Starbucks at Cooper Union. “I came back from break,” he said, “and it was gone. We used to hang out there and get cups and fill them with strawberry champagne and feel glamorous. There’s no room for life to be lived there now.” I began to notice a pattern: The years people said the city was at its best almost always coincided with when they themselves were at their hottest.

As a reporter, she has written about imprisoned women in Alabama, the rap star Bobby Shmurda, and the rise of DIY abortions. She has also written personal essays, including two for the New York Times Modern Love column, and four for the New York Times Magazine’s “Lives” column. The New York Times named her essay “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give” its 41st most read story of 2015. In fall 2016, W.W. Norton announced that it would publish a collection of related essays in spring 2017, called Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give.

St. Marks Is Dead was a New York Times Editors’ Pick, Amazon Book of the Month, and named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus, the Boston Globe, Orlando Weekly, the New York Post. The Village Voice called it, “The Best Nonfiction Book About New York, 2015,” and said, “With St. Marks Is Dead, Ada Calhoun just became the most important new voice on old New York.”

The Atlantic wrote: “Timely, provocative, and stylishly written …Calhoun’s book serves as a welcome corrective to that rallying cry [that gentrification is bad], and to the tendency to romanticize New York City in the 1970s, when the city was far more riotous and permissive than it is now. … Her aplomb, in fact, is precisely what the discussion needs. Her portrait of neighborhood resilience might suggest more temperate proposals for an increasingly polarized debate.”

The New York Times Book Review said, “Calhoun, who grew up on St. Mark’s Place, is careful not to romanticize any one era of the East Village (which serves as a suitable proxy for much of New York City during the past century). St. Marks Is Dead is an ecstatic roll call.”

Awards

Calhoun won the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award gold medal in U.S. History, a 2015 USC-Annenberg National Health Journalism Fellowship, a 2014 Kiplinger fellowship, a 2013 Council on Contemporary Families Media Award, and a 2014 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship; one of her Patterson stories won the 2015 Croly Award

Personal life

In 2004, Calhoun married Jerry Neal Medlin, who performs as Neal Medlyn and Champagne Jerry, whom she met when she was sent to interview him for an Austin Chronicle profile. They have one son together, Oliver. She is an advocate for libraries. She majored in Plan II Honors at the University of Texas at Austin, where for her senior thesis she translated part of the Sanskrit Atharvaveda.