Graduate Profile: Chris Newton, MTS '23

How I've Changed  

HDS guided me to return to myself again. I came here to become who, deep down, I’m not: an academic. I then almost became further removed from myself, never to return; I nearly pivoted completely into the world of business, which is contrary to my purpose. However, through colleagues and friends—some who served as mirrors and others as foghorns— I came again to who I am: a writer with a passion to serve other writers. But now I am more culturally and religiously sensitive and informed, equipped to navigate the spiritual dimensions of languages and their histories, especially my own, with curiosity and care. I have learned, too, that I am a scholar-practitioner of words. I am both a critic and an artist, not one or the other. 

Message of Thanks  

First and foremost, I would like to thank my brother, Richie. With relentless perseverance, a heart of steel-embroidered gold, and a profound dose of curiosity for life, he is a star who always helps me return home to our roots. Alongside him is Tobi, his fiancé, for whom I am also dearly in thanks. Not only does she whip sense into me when much needed, but she is also an anchor and beacon for my brother. My dad has also been a wonderful supporter of my trajectory, although often in enthusiastic silence; and so, too, with my mom, who always cheerleads in memory and floats the peripheries of my work in spirit. Finally, I’d like to thank my friends in San Diego, especially my best friend, Jasmine, and my fellow HDS scholars, Haley and Melina. Faculty members who have been keys to my journey are Michael Jackson, Dan McKanan, John Brown, and James Wood in the English Department. Thank you. 

Future Plans 

I will continue my path at New York University in the fall, where I will work toward my Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction writing. There, I will complete a memoir about my mother, collaging her diaries with my journals, which will be informed by the histories of the essay, book, English language, and Western philosophy of religion. This summer, through the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, I will co-teach a creative nonfiction course at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. Entrepreneurial muses are in the midst, too; on the shoreside, I’ll typewrite freestyle poems on vintage postcards and offer custom translations of texts into Old English, calligraphed in Gothic script. Over the years, I will continue to write novels, short stories, essays, and poems, and I aspire to teach university-level creative writing, post-MFA.