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" is the cover story for the June 2014 issue of Harper's Magazine. Random House has acquired Newton's forthcoming book about the science and superstition of ancestry.

Newton was raised in a fundamentalist household. She attended college and law school at the University of Florida and currently resides in Brooklyn.

She was awarded the 2009 Narrative Prize for "When the Flock Changed," an excerpt from her novel-in-progress. 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.