Rebecca "Maud" Newton is a writer, critic, and former lawyer born in Dallas, Texas in 1971.

[16][17] Her first book, the non-fiction Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, was published by Random House in 2022.

[18][19][20] The book was named one of the best of 2022 by The New Yorker,[21] NPR,[22] The Washington Post,[23] The Boston Globe,[24] Time,[25] Esquire,[26] Garden & Gun,[27] Entertainment Weekly,[28] and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

[29] Newton was born in Dallas and raised in a fundamentalist household in Miami by an evangelical mother and racist father.

[36][33] 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.