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Ada Calhoun

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Ada Calhoun is an American nonfiction writer. She is the author of St. Marks Is Dead, a history of St. Mark's Place in East Village, Manhattan, New York; Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, a book of marriage essays; Why We Can't Sleep, a book about Generation X women and their struggles, and Also a Poet, a memoir about her father and the poet Frank O'Hara.

She has also been a critic, frequently contributing to The New York Times Book Review; a co-author and ghostwriter, collaborating on three books by Tim Gunn; a freelance essayist and reporter. A Village Voice profile in 2015 said: "Her CV can seem as though it were cobbled together from the résumés of three ambitious journalists."

Calhoun grew up on St. Marks Place in East Village, Manhattan. She is the only child of art critic Peter Schjeldahl and actress Brooke Alderson. They appear as characters in her book St. Marks Is Dead, which she dedicated to them. She has written in The New York Times Magazine about a childhood fascination with the suburbs. As a teenager, she traveled through India and met Mother Teresa. She changed her name in 1998 to avoid comparison to her father.

As a reporter, she has written about imprisoned women in Alabama, the rap star Bobby Shmurda, and the rise of DIY abortions. She has also written personal essays, including three for The New York Times's "Modern Love" column and four for The New York Times Magazine's "Lives" column. The New York Times named her essay "The Wedding Toast I'll Never Give" its 41st-most-read story of 2015. In 2016, W.W. Norton announced that it would publish a collection of related essays in 2017 called Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give. In October 2017, Oprah.com published her article "The New Midlife Crisis." Chartbeat named the paper the internet's 55th-most-read story of 2017.

Calhoun won the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award gold medal in U.S. History, the 2015 USC-Annenberg National Health Journalism Fellowship, the 2014 Kiplinger fellowship, the 2013 Council on Contemporary Families Media Award, and the 2014 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship; one of her Patterson stories won the 2015 Croly Award.

In 2004, Calhoun married Jerry Neal Medlin, who performs as Neal Medlyn, and Champagne Jerry, whom she met when she was sent to interview him for an Austin Chronicle profile. They have a son together. She is an advocate for libraries. She majored in Plan II Honors at the University of Texas at Austin, where she translated part of the Sanskrit Atharvaveda for her senior thesis. Calhoun is the granddaughter of Gilmore Schjeldahl, the inventor of the plastic-lined airsickness bag.

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Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

Tom Hanks
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