Antonia Hylton

Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC and is the co-host of the hit podcast Southlake.

From 2016 to 2020, she was a correspondent and producer for Vice Media and HBO’s nightly news and documentary show, Vice News Tonight. Since 2019, she has also served as an annual judge for the American Mosaic Journalism Prize.

Hylton will discuss her new book, "Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum," available January 2024. "Madness" is an exploration of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Hylton blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decades-worth of investigative research and archival documents. It chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.

Hylton won several awards, including an Emmy for her development and reporting of an HBO special episode on the family separation crisis, a Gracie Award for her stories about women, a NAMIC Vision Award for reporting on violence and politics in Chicago, and two Front Page Awards for special reporting and breaking news. In 2020, she moderated the Brown & Black Democratic Presidential Forum in Iowa, pressing then-candidates Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg.

Hylton graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2015, where she received prizes for her writing and investigative research on race, mass incarceration, and the history of psychiatry. When she’s not in the field reporting, she mentors other young reporters and advocates for organizations focused on justice and poverty eradication.

Hylton will sign books immediately after the session in the LLX Marketplace.