Stephen Newton at home in Southern Appalachia

In 2006, after a forty-year career as an award-winning corporate communications designer, Stephen Newton moved to Southern Appalachia where he lives with his wife, Angela, a painter, and their tuxedo cat, Mama.

Although he has been writing and publishing fiction since then, he also spent more than a decade (2010 - 2023) as an independent filmmaker, writing, directing, and producing documentaries that explore the causes and consequences of social injustice.

In 2014, he released his first feature length documentary, Outcasts: Surviving the Culture of Rejection, which examines our criminal justice system and reveals why the US incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world.

His second film, One Night in January: Counting the Cost of Homelessness, premiered in April 2020. The film answers the question, “Why are millions of Americans experiencing extreme poverty and homelessness in the richest country in the world?”

Newton’s most recent fiction, essays, films, and book reviews, are featured in several literary magazines including, Drunk Monkeys, Cagibi, The Write Launch, Litro Magazine USA, On The Run, The Atticus Review, Still: The Journal, and The Lumina Journal among others. He is currently writing a mystery novel set in the 1970s and a short story collection.