Authors Lee Hawkins (I Am Nobody’s Slave) and Maud Newton (Ancestor Trouble) explore the complexities of family history and the intergenerational legacies we carry. In conversation, they discuss race, inheritance, trauma, and resilience—and how confronting the past can offer hope for future generations.

Lee Hawkins is the author of I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2025), a critically acclaimed memoir that traces 400 years of his Black American family’s history through slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the intergenerational trauma that followed. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2022, Hawkins is a nationally recognized investigative journalist whose most recent work documents the lives of Black American descendants of slavery and Jim Crow survivors, exposing America's role in imposing a long legacy of racial violence, childhood trauma, and economic injustice. Hawkins is currently a 2023–2024 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism and the 2024 Josephine Albright Fellow of the Alicia Patterson Foundation.

Maud Newton's Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House) was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, the Washington Post, Time, Esquire, and more. Maud has discussed her own family history, and the importance of acknowledging ancestors’ complicity in cultural harms, with NPR’s All Things Considered, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, WNYC, and UC Davis Jewish Studies/Religious Studies. In addition to nonfiction, Maud writes fiction and cultural criticism. She received the Narrative Prize and City College’s Irwin and Alice Stark Short Fiction Prize, both for fiction. She been a Yaddo resident and has taught at the Omega Institute. Maud was born in Dallas and raised in Miami, and lives in New York City.