Ada Calhoun
is a book author and journalist.

Ada Calhoun is the author of two critically acclaimed nonfiction books, both named Amazon Books of the Month: the New York City history St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street, and the collection of marriage essays Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give.

Named one of the top ten memoirs of 2017, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give has been called “realistic, loving, laugh-out-loud funny” (Publishers Weekly); “graceful, hilarious” (Library Journal); “engaging, wise, lovely” (Kirkus); “original, engrossing” (New York Times Book Review); and “warm-hearted, Ephron-esque” (Washington Post). Modern Love published the book's first serial excerpt as "To Stay Married, Embrace Change;" it reached #1 on the Most Emailed list. The book was featured on the Today show and as a "Hot Book" in Star. The press release for the paperback, out June 2018, is here.

St. Marks Is Dead is a 400-year history of the New York City street where the author grew up. It has been called “revelatory” (Kirkus), “captivating” (Publishers Weekly), “delightful” (Wall Street Journal), “timely, provocative, and stylishly written” (Atlantic) and “an ecstatic roll call” (New York Times Book Review). The New Yorker online published the first serial excerpt, and the New York Times ran this related op-ed about cities and change.

A New York Times Editors’ Pick, St. Marks Is Dead was named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus, the Boston Globe, Orlando Weekly, the New York Post, and the Village Voice, and it won the gold medal for U.S. History in the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards. The Voice called it 2015’s “Best Nonfiction Book About New York,” and in a cover profile named its author “the most important new voice on Old New York.”

Calhoun has freelanced for newspapers and magazines for twenty years, with roles including crime reporter for the New York Post, frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, and theater critic for New York magazine. She has written for Time, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, Billboard, The New Yorker online (including three “Page-Turner” columns), Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and several sections of the New York Times—including two op-eds, three Modern Loves, and four Lives columns.

Her national news reporting has won multiple awards, including a USC-Annenberg National Health Journalism Fellowship, Kiplinger fellowship, CCF Media Award (for her New York Times Magazine reporting in Alabama), Croly Award, and an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship.

She has been a featured speaker at several national book festivals and appeared many times on national radio and television, including three times on the Today show. And she has taught writing at various colleges and workshops, including public affairs reporting at Hofstra University, non-fiction at the Rutgers Summer Conference, and memoir at the 2018 Miami Book Fair's Writers Institute.

As a ghostwriter, she has collaborated on a dozen books for major publishers, several of which were New York Times bestsellers.

She is now working a new nonfiction book, The New Midlife Crisis, which was inspired by her 2017 viral story for Oprah.com about Generation X women in midlife. It sold to Audible in what the New York Times recently called "a highly unusual deal," and will be published as an Audible Original sometime in 2019.

She lives in New York City with her husband and son.

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