The Brattleboro Literary Festival invites you to join us on September 9, at 5:00 PM for a virtual Literary Cocktail Hour, featuring Maud Newton and her book Ancestor Trouble, in conversation with Rebecca Donner. Maud Newton's ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother's father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother's grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer's attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

Maud Newton is a writer and a critic. Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House), her first book, has been called "a literary feat" by the New York Times Book Review and a "brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation" by the Boston Globe, praised by Oprah Daily, NPR, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, and many others, and named one of Esquire's best books of 2022.

Rebecca Donner is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the 2022 PEN /Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, the 2022 Chautauqua Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Plutarch Award.

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