Pre-Conference Virtual Roundtables

Optional pre-conference roundtable discussion groups offer biographers with shared interests the opportunity to meet and connect before the conference begins. These small-group conversations are facilitated by a host (named in parentheses below), who will guide introductions, answer questions, and lead a focused discussion.

The roundtables will take place online approximately one week before the conference and are open exclusively to in-person registrants. Each one-hour session is limited to 10 participants, and you may sign up for only one roundtable. A list of roundtable options will be available when you purchase your ticket; please sign up as early as possible, but no later than May 15. Because space is limited, register only if you plan to participate. The roundtable host will contact you with a link shortly before the scheduled meeting.

All times are New York (Eastern Daylight) Time. 

Monday, May 18, 1:00–2:00 PM

• Popular Culture (Jared Stearns)
• Group Biography (Lauren Arrington)

Tuesday, May 19, 2:00–3:00 PM

• Science, Medicine, and Technology (Karen Torghele)
• Literary Biography (Steve Paul)
• First-Time Biographers (Linda Leavell)
• Women’s Lives (A’Lelia Bundles)

Tuesday, May 19, 7:00–8:00 PM

• Overlooked Lives (Pamela Toler)
• Military History (Marc Leepson)
• Visual and Performing Arts (Natalie Dykstra)
  

Wednesday, May 20, 2:00–3:00 PM

• Politics and Law (Kathleen Stone)
• Women’s Lives (Iris Dunkle)

Wednesday, May 20, 7:00–8:00 PM

• Social Justice (Louise “Lucy” Knight)
• Black Biography (Rachel Swarns and Emily Bernard)

Thursday, May 28

All times listed are New York (Eastern Daylight) time.

Note: Tours are limited to those who signed up in advance. If you would like to participate, you must select the tour of your choosing as a ticket add-on when you register for the conference through Humanitix. Capacity is limited.

10 AM–11:30 AM
TOUR: New York Public Library (limited to 40)
Welcome reception and archive introductions.

TOUR: Century Association archives (limited to 20)
Experts from the Century Association, a private club founded in 1847 by leading figures in the arts and culture world and housed since the 1890s in a grand neoclassical clubhouse in midtown, will give BIO members a clubhouse tour. Highlights from the art collection, library, and archives will shed light on luminaries, including artists (Hiram Powers, Winslow Homer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Paul Manship, Romare Bearden), architects (Stanford White, Charles Platt), and writers (William Cullen Bryant, Henry James).

11 AM – 12:30 PM
TOUR: New York Historical (limited to 15)

12:00 PM
Registration opens, CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave, Concourse Level)

1 PM – 2:30 PM
TOUR: NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (limited to 15)
The Schomburg Center is celebrating its Centennial! Join Associate Director of Collections Dr. Crystal Moten for a tour of the centennial exhibits from a biographical perspective. She will walk you through the current exhibits and highlight the many individuals who helped shape the Schomburg Center into what it is today.

2:00 PM–3:15 PM
TOUR: Morgan Library Special Collections (limited to 15)
Attendees will have the chance to view objects and collections from the Morgan Library & Museum’s Literary and Historical Manuscripts department (LHMS). Curators from the department will be on hand to discuss materials on view and answer questions about the department’s holdings. LHMS preserves the Morgan’s modern manuscripts, with special strengths in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature, along with key collections such as the Pierre Matisse Gallery archive, the Paris Review archive, and a growing assortment of letters, journals, editing notebooks, and shooting scripts by the filmmaker James Ivory.

3:30 PM–5:00 PM
Member Readings & Awards Presentation, CUNY Graduate Center Auditorium

3-Minute Readings by BIO members with biographies published June 1, 2025–May 30, 2026. Space is extremely limited; sign-ups are first-come, first-served. Send book info with publication date, a brief author bio (50-100 words), a high-res cover image, and the subject’s date of birth, to president@biographersinternational.org and tfloreani [at] gmail.com.

Award Presentations: the Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowships, the Clio Fellowship, the Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowships, the Hazel Rowley Prize, the Chip Bishop Fellowship, the Biblio Award, and the Ray A. Shepard Service Award.

5:30 PM–7:30 PM
Welcome Reception, The Century Association, 7 W. 43rd St. (near Fifth Avenue), Midtown Manhattan, a short walk from the Graduate Center

Friday, May 29

All times listed are New York (Eastern Daylight) time. During ticket checkout, in-person attendees must choose which panels to attend during the four sessions on Friday.

All panels and plenaries at CUNY Graduate Center.

8:00–8:40 AM

Registration and Breakfast

8:40 AM–9:00 AM

Welcome from BIO President Steve Paul and Leon Levy Center Executive Director Kai Bird, Auditorium

9:00 AM–10:00 AM

JAMES ATLAS PLENARY, Auditorium

Ron Chernow and Brenda Wineapple in Conversation

Ron Chernow is the prizewinning author of eight books and the recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. His first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award, Washington: A Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and Alexander Hamilton—the inspiration for the Broadway musical—won the George Washington Book Prize. He has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is one of only three living biographers to have won the Gold Medal for Biography of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A past president of PEN America, Chernow has been the recipient of nine honorary doctorates.

Brenda Wineapple is a National Book Critics Award finalist whose most recent book is the national bestseller, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, named a Best Book of 2024 by The New Yorker, among other publications. Her other books include The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation and Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, both named best books of the year by The New York Times, and the award-winning White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Hawthorne: A Life. A recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ambassador Award, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities, as well as a National Endowment Public Scholars Award, she was recently a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She regularly contributes to The New York Review of Books and, previously, was Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies at Union College and executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Her biography of Fiorello La Guardia will be published as part of the Yale University Series of Jewish Lives next year.

10:15 AM–11:15 AM

BASICS

In the Right Hands: Biographers as Collectors
Biographers can support their research by collecting important related material often overlooked on the market or in storerooms and unavailable in any repository or online. This panel will explore what authors have purchased, inherited, or been given, whether books, manuscripts, periodicals, ephemera, artworks, textiles, or objects, produced or owned by or pertaining to the biography subjects. The panelists will illustrate and illuminate the value of what they acquired, sometimes in the most unexpected places and at the last minute, and will discuss how items shaped their biography narratives and shed light on pivotal moments in their subjects’ lives and careers. The session will also cover how those materials can be transferred to institutional collections for safekeeping.

Moderator

A’Lelia Bundles is the author of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, a biography of her great-grandmother, and On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother. Her books have benefited from the voluminous Walker Company documents that her family donated to the Indiana Historical Society in the early 1980s. To organize and preserve another trove of materials inherited from her grandparents, she founded the Madam Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker ephemera, photographs, and correspondence. She serves on several nonprofit boards and was a producer and executive during her 30-year career in network television news.

Panelists

Eve M. Kahn, an independent scholar and regular New York Times contributor, has written two biographies that have resulted in boxfuls of important primary source material tucked away in her home. She has thousands of pages of circa-1900 correspondence that inspired her 2019 book about the forgotten artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857-1907), as well as rare periodicals, inscribed books, photos, ephemera, and even restaurant cutlery related her 2025 book about the writer, publisher and social justice activist Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914).

Richard Kopley, Distinguished Professor emeritus of English at Penn State DuBois, is the author of Edgar Allan Poe: A Life (University of Virginia Press, 2025). The book is informed by Kopley’s extraordinary archive of letters about Poe by Flora Lapham Mack, the stepdaughter of Poe’s best friend, John H. Mackenzie. Kopley is also the author of The Threads of “The Scarlet Letter”: A Study of Hawthorne’s Transformative Art (University of Delaware Press, 2003), Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe to the Present (Camden House, 2018). Former president of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and the Poe Studies Association, he is the first recipient of the PSA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Kopley served as a Fulbright Specialist and a Virginia Humanities Fellow, and he recently became a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Jared Stearns is the author of Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress, 2024). He has built the largest known collection of Chambers memorabilia, spanning personal papers, photographs, contracts, film, periodicals, ephemera, and even clothing. He has written about Chambers for publications such as Cineaste, The Dark Side, and The San Franciscan. His work has also appeared in The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston. He’s working on his next biography.

CRAFT

Radical Biography for Teens
Writing biography for teens and their people has changed drastically in the past fifteen years. More and more authors are breaking the mold in the way young adult and middle grade biographies are written and who they are written about. No subject is off-limits for kids—if you know what you’re doing. Writing for this age group also gives authors the chance to make a difference in the future. Come listen to a panel of award-winning biographers talk about why they write for teens, how they do it, and why biographers should consider this field. Among the topics panelists will discuss are: How writing for this age group gives authors the freedom to just tell the story they want to tell; how authors can handle complex and controversial topics; who reads YA biography (hint: not just kids) and why.

Moderator

Angela Carstensen is the author of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Teen Literature (ALA Editions, 2018) and served as chair of the first YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults committee (2010) and the 2018 Michael L. Printz Award committee as an active member of the American Library Association. She writes and reviews for Booklist and is a lecturer in young adult literature for the graduate program in Library and Information Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is currently writing a narrative nonfiction, historical true crime biography for young adults. She attended the 2025 Community of Writers Nonfiction/Memoir Workshop as recipient of the Christina Meldrum Memorial Scholarship.

Panelists

Deborah Heiligman has written 34 books for children and young adults, many of them biographies. Her latest, Loudmouth: Emma Goldman vs. America (A Love Story), published last September, was called a “masterclass” by Booklist. It was named an Editors’ Choice by Booklist, a Chicago Public Library Best Book for Teens, and a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, Top Ten Book for Teens. Other biographies include: Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith, a National Book Award finalist, Michael L. Printz Honor winner, and inaugural YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award winner, and Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers, a Printz Honor, YALSA winner, and Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner. She is currently working on a biography of Margot Frank.

Ray Anthony Shepard is the author of three award-winning biographies for young readers: Now or Never!: 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s War to End Slavery; Runaway: The Daring Escape of Ona Judge; and A Long Time Coming: A Lyrical Biography of Race In America from Ona Judge to Barack Obama. His fourth, The Fall and Rise of Malcolm X, will be published this October. After years of teaching eighth-grade American history and editing textbooks, Ray launched an encore career telling stories of Black lives that were more authentic than those found in schoolbooks.

BUSINESS

What Do Editors Want?

Moderator

Bill Goldstein in reviews books for NBC’s Weekend Today in New York, and was the founding editor of The New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is writing a biography of playwright and activist Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown. He was a recipient of BIO’s Robert and Ina Caro Travel/Research Fellowship in 2022 and was awarded a 2024-25 Public Scholars grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to support his work on the book. He is the author of The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature (2017).

Panelists

Thomas Gebremedhin is vice president and executive editor at Doubleday, joining the imprint after a decade at The Atlantic. He recently became Editorial Director of Outsider Editions, a reissue series dedicated to elevating significant literary works overlooked by the traditional canon. At Doubleday, his first acquisition was Hua Hsu’s Stay True, which won both the NBCC and the Pulitzer Prize. He works with biographers including Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser (Susan Sontag) and National Book Critics Circle winner Julie Phillips (James Tiptree, Jr.), who is currently working on a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin. He also acquires memoir, history, criticism, essays, and literary fiction, and is drawn to writers who engage in cultural, sociological, intellectual, and personal questions. His other authors include Maaza Mengiste, Amanda Hess, Kyle Chayka, Tao Leigh Goffe, Vincent Bevins, Jen Percy, Aymann Ismail, Zach Williams, and Merritt Tierce. He believes the best books begin at the level of the sentence.

 John Glusman is a vice president and executive editor of W. W. Norton & Company. His authors have included New York Times bestsellers Neil de Grasse Tyson, Frans de Waal, Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Powers, National Book Critics Circle winner Saidiya Hartman, and L.A. Times Book Prize winners Margaret Burnham and Dan Ephron. His award-winning biographies include John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams, William Souder’s Mad At the World, and Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing. He is the author of Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, winner of the Colby Award for best work of military nonfiction by a first-time author. A Distinguished Alumnus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, he founded the Westchester Book Festival in 2025.

Jenna Johnson, senior vice president and editor-in-chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has published a range of award-winning and bestselling titles, including biographies Sister, Sinner by Claire Hoffman, Starry and Restless by Julia Cooke and the forthcoming The Formidable Mrs. Chao by Jen Lin-Liu. Jenna publishes fiction and narrative nonfiction, with particular interest in original, inventive, and surprising voices, stories from around the world, religion, cultural and literary history, memoir and biography, the earth and its creatures, and food.

ISSUES

Life Writing and Difference: A Conversation on Race and Biography
Are there particular challenges facing the biographer who chooses to write about someone with a different racial identity? What does it take to navigate these challenges successfully? How do you know if you are the right person to tell the story of an individual whose backgrounds and life experiences look substantially different from your own? This panel presents a conversation between two prominent biographers who have written notably across racial lines. Emily Bernard and Nicholas Boggs will examine the rich but underexplored ingredients that constitute the sometimes mysterious and always durable connections between biographers and their subjects.

Panelists

Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, which received the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize; Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Carl Van Vechten: A Portrait in Black and White. Her work has appeared in: Harper’s, TLS, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily was a 2024-2025 fellow at the Leon Levy Center.

Nicholas Boggs is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and co-editor of Baldwin’s collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018). He is the recipient of the Robert and Ina Caro Travel and Research Fellowship from BIO, a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant.

11:30 AM–12:30 PM

BASICS 

Using Genealogical Tools to Research Your Biographical Subject
In writing and researching biography, it’s often necessary to take a genealogical expedition. From finding descendants of your subject (and their associates), to researching family history, using genealogical tools can lend an important dimension to your subject’s story. Panelists will talk about their experiences and give tips on using everything from commercial genealogical databases and newspapers, to obituaries, archival correspondence, and other resources (online and print). You never know where a genealogical trail will lead you: biographical treasures await.

Moderator

Bernice Lerner is the author of All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and other writings on the Holocaust and on virtue ethics. She is the former dean of adult learning at Hebrew College and a senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility.

Panelists

Nick Reynolds has written two biographies, and is working on a third. Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy; Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 was a New York Times bestseller in 2017. He has served as a field historian for the Marine Corps and as the historian for the CIA Museum. He holds a PhD in history from Oxford University.

Sue Rubenstein DeMasi is the author of Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project. She’s written and spoken widely about the New Deal and its figures, including Alsberg, Frances Perkins, and HUAC chair Martin Dies. She’s is currently working on a bio of John G. Winant, the first chair of Social Security, Ambassador to England (WWII), and the first U.S. director of the International Labour Organization. Sue has spoken at the Library of Congress, the University of California at Berkeley, and three Presidential Libraries on Alsberg, the New Deal, and John Winant. 

Cindy Schweich Handler is the author of A German Jew’s Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany. A journalist and former editor and writer for The USA Today Network, her work has appeared in The New York Times, AARP: The Magazine, Newsweek, Redbook and a host of other national publications. She has written about subject matter contained in A German Jew’s Triumph in The Washington Post and NorthJersey.com. Handler lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and fellow BIO member Harry Handler.

CRAFT

Dancing About Architecture: Writing Biographies of Musicians
There’s an old truism about how challenging it is to write about music (“like dancing about architecture”). So how do biographers tackle writing the life of someone who composed music as their vocation? What are some of the most successful, surprising, and quirkily singular tools for conveying this abstract, invisible form of art? How do we balance technical detail with readable drama, and also decide how to balance the life and the music? Four biographers of musicians will discuss how they translated pure sound and its creation into understandable, entertaining prose for general readers.

Moderator

Tim Greiving is the author of John Williams: A Composer’s Life (Oxford University Press), the first biography of the renowned film composer. Greiving is an arts journalist and historian in Los Angeles who specializes in film music. He regularly writes for the Los Angeles Times and has contributed stories and interviews to National Public Radio, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Criterion, Variety, The Ringer, Los Angeles Magazine, and Vulture. He has written program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Royal Albert Hall, and liner notes for more than a hundred soundtrack albums.

Panelists

Steven C. Smith, author of Hitchcock & Herrmann: The Friendship & Film Scores That Changed Cinema (Oxford University Press). Smith is an Emmy-nominated documentary producer, author, and speaker who specializes in Hollywood history and profiles of contemporary filmmakers. A four-time Emmy nominee and sixteen-time Telly Award winner, Steven has produced and written over 200 documentaries. He is also the author of Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer (Oxford), and A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (University of California Press).

John T. Reddick is the author of a forthcoming book on Harlem’s Black and Jewish Music Culture 1890-1930. Reddick is an architectural preservationist, historian, and Harlem resident. Currently, he is engaged as the director of community engagement projects for the Central Park Conservancy and serves on the board of the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. His knowledge of Harlem’s culture and architecture has served to advance several public art and open space projects in that community, which include the Ralph Ellison Memorial, Harriet Tubman Square, and the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Circle, as well as New York’s LGBT Memorial and Monument in Hudson River Park.

Will Hermes is the author of Lou Reed: King of New York (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Best Non-Fiction 2024 Kirkus Review). Hermes is also the author of Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (Editor’s Choice 2011 New York Times Book Review), and he writes the Substack newsletter New Music + Old Music. He’s a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, a longtime contributor to The New York Times and National Public Radio, and his work also appears in The Guardian, Pitchfork, and Uncut.

BUSINESS

Beyond the Launch: Audience Outreach for the Long Term 
After the initial buzz of the book launch dies down, how do you keep your subject(s) in the public eye and reach new audiences? Promotion is a long game—and it’s not always just about selling books. Participants in this panel will discuss strategies they’ve found effective in expanding outreach and building connections through avenues such as newsletters, websites, and digital projects, specialty and virtual tours, exhibits, and institutional partnerships. Attendees will come away with creative ideas plus practical information on what it takes to adopt various approaches and sustain them over the long haul.

Moderator

After a 30-year career as a journalist, editor, and science writer, Diana Parsell made her debut as a biographer in 2023 with the publication of Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees (Oxford University Press). She received BIO’s 2017 Hazel Rowley Prize and a Mayborn Fellowship in Biography. She’s worked on staff or as a contractor for a wide range of publications, including National Geographic and The Washington Post, and for several major science organizations in Washington and Southeast Asia. In an outgrowth of her book research, she’s a docent for public tours at the Library of Congress.

Panelists

Marc Leepson is a journalist and historian and the author of 11 books, including four biographies: Lafayette: Idealist General (2011, 2025), What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life (2014), Ballad of the Green Beret (2017), and The Unlikely War Hero (2024), on Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest-ranking POW held in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. A former staff writer for Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C., Marc taught U.S. history at Laurel Ridge Community College in Warrenton, Virginia, from 2008 to 2015. First elected to BIO’s board of directors in 2013, he just completed 11 years as treasurer. 

Heath Lee is an award-winning historian, biographer, and curator. Her narrative nonfiction book The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from Vietnam (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) is currently being developed as a television series. Heath’s new book, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: Washington’s Most Private First Lady is the first commercial biography of First Lady Pat Nixon in almost 40 years. She currently serves on the boards of FLARE, the First Ladies Association for Research and Education, and of BIO.

Armed with a PhD in history, a well-thumbed deck of library cards, and a large bump of curiosity, Pamela D. Toler, a member of the BIO board, is the author of ten works of historical nonfiction for adults and children, including her most recent, The Dragon From Chicago: The Untold Story of An American Reporter in Nazi Germany. She has written a twice-weekly blog, “History in the Margins,” for almost fifteen years and a bi-monthly newsletter for nine years—and she still has no idea what she’s doing.

Author of Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin and Most Fortunate Unfortunates: The Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans (both LSU Press), Marlene Trestman builds promotion around her website, www.marlenetrestman.com, which includes research databases and nearly 200 illustrated profiles. Through institutional collaborations and publications, Marlene has become an authority on women advocates at the U.S. Supreme Court and on American Jewish orphanages. She has curated a museum exhibition on the Jewish orphanage in New Orleans and obtained a coveted “Overlooked” obituary for Bessie Margolin in The New York Times.

ISSUES

Troublemakers 
Visionaries who advocate for extreme social changes pose unique challenges for biographers delving into the personal and public lives of their subjects. Often, the most successful activists are working towards a version of themselves that they aspire to become; leaving evidence counter to that construction may not have been in their interests. The myth that follows them may be incomplete or inaccurate.  Inevitably, such figures have ruffled feathers, made enemies, and upset their antagonists. This panel, on writing biographies of troublemakers in their full historical contexts, considers the challenges—and opportunities, especially at this moment—of telling stories of those who set themselves against the norms of their day.

Moderator

Kate Clifford Larson is the bestselling author of several biographies, including Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (2021), Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (2015), Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (2004), and The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln (2008). An award-winning consultant, Larson has worked on feature films—including Focus Features’ Harriet and Robert Redford’s The Conspirator—documentaries, museum exhibits, historical parks interpretation, heritage tourism products, and curriculum guides. She holds two degrees from Simmons, an MBA from Northeastern, and a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. Her next book, Ethel and Bobby: Inside the Marriage That Shaped a Nation is due out from Little, Brown & Company in 2027.

Panelists

Ashley Farmer’s Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore (Pantheon, 2025), tells the story of Black nationalism’s leading progenitor, a founder of the reparations movement, and a mentor to many. It also unravels a larger history of Black radicalism and the popular myths and misunderstandings surrounding it, including the ways in which women’s contributions to civil rights history have been minimized. Ashley Farmer teaches history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas, Austin, and she is the author of the previously published and acclaimed Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, among other works.  

Caleb Gayle’s Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (Riverhead, 2025) tells the story of Edward P. McCabe’s struggle to make Oklahoma the country’s first Black state shortly after emancipation. McCabe, known as the “Black Moses,” led the exodusters, as Black colonizers of the West became known, on a quixotic journey that tells a story of race, hope, and the nation, which illuminates as much in the failures of McCabe’s bold ambitions as it does in the short-lived, spectacular effects of McCabe’s call for Black freedom. Caleb Gayle teaches journalism at Northeastern University and has published widely in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere.  Black Moses was widely reviewed and long-listed for the National Book Award.

Carla Kaplan’s Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford (Harper, 2025) tells the unlikely story of Jessica Mitford’s escape from the British aristocracy, her rejection of its privileges and comforts, and her life as an American Communist, civil rights activist, and wildly successful muckraking writer known for works such as her 1963 blockbuster The American Way of Death. Decca, as she was known, was a remarkably successful ally in civil rights, antiwar, consumer rights, and prison abolition movements, cannily wielding the privileged background she rejected to stand out amongst other leftists and making brilliant use of her irrepressible wit. Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American literature, teaches English, women’s studies, and African-American studies, and has published seven previous books, including Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, both New York Times “Notable Books.”

Randal Maurice Jelks is the author of five books, a professor, and a documentary film producer. His most recently published book is My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy (Broadleaf Books).

12:30 PM–2:30 PM

Lunch and Awards Presentation, Auditorium
BIO Award and Keynote Address by the recipient, followed by presentation of the Biblio Award and the Plutarch Award

2:45–3:45 PM

BASICS

The Agents’ View
What’s the publishing market like right now for biographers? Three agents who have represented BIO members and other best-selling non-fiction authors share their perspectives on questions that are on the minds of many authors. What kinds of “voices” are attracting publishers now? What’s the overall publishing market like now? What makes an effective proposal? Do authors always benefit by having an agent sell their books? How can authors protect their works in the burgeoning world of Artificial Intelligence? Bring your own questions for this panel of experienced publishing professionals to address.

Moderator

Sara Fitzgerald is the author of The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, which was recognized by The Washington Post as one of its Fifty Top Non-Fiction Books of 2024, and Elly Peterson: Mother of the Moderates, chosen as a Notable Book of 2012 by the Library of Michigan. She has also published in fiction and narrative non-fiction. She is a member of the BIO Board of Directors. 

Panelists

Amelia Atlas, based in the New York office of Creative Artists Agency, represents both fiction and nonfiction. She has a particular interest in narrative nonfiction in the areas of history, current affairs, science, investigative journalism, and cultural criticism. Her authors have been short- or long-listed for the National Book Award, the International Booker Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Awards, among others.

Tanya McKinnon is the principal of New York-based Tanya McKinnon Literary. She represents serious nonfiction, literary fiction, children’s books, and graphic novels. Her clients have included recipients of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the L.A. Times Book Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among other awards. After growing up in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, she now finds her home in books that “confront the chaos of reality and distill it into narratives that leave us wise and more human for having read them.” 

Ritz Rosenkranz, principal in the New York-based Rita Rosenkranz Literary Agency, represents adult nonfiction titles almost exclusively. Her wide-ranging list includes health, history, parenting, music, how-to, popular science, business, biography, sports, popular reference, cooking, writing, memoir, spirituality, illustrated books, and general interest titles. Her authors have been recognized by the Military Writers Society of America, the Association of Science Editors, and regional literary organizations, among others. 

CRAFT

Experimenting With Biographical Form
This panel will explore the process of writing experimental biographies, which take the biographical form in new, often unexpected, and sometimes risky directions, incorporating (amongst other things) visual elements, objects, and borrowings from the techniques of memoir, travel writing, the detective story, or even the quest narrative.

Moderator

Janice P. Nimura received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on The Doctors Blackwell, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Her previous book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, was a New York Times Notable book in 2015. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, The Rumpus, and LitHub, among other publications.

Panelists

Nina Ellis is the first biographer of the American short story writer Lucia Berlin (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2027) and an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at The American University in Cairo. She holds a PhD in American literature from the University of Cambridge, and she also writes short stories, for which she received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention in 2025. She won a Work-in-Progress Award from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation in 2024, and she was the Biographers International Organization’s Chip Bishop Fellow in 2023.

Howard Fishman is an author, musician, composer, theatre-maker, and cultural essayist, based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Telegraph, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, ArtForum, The Village Voice, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His book debut, To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, is out now from Dutton.

BUSINESS

University Presses Make the Grade
University presses have long had a reputation for publishing deadly academic tomes, but they seem to have become our most prolific and reliable publishers of general interest biography. This panel will focus on the changing fortunes and strategies of university presses, on what they are looking for in a biography, and on whether you will make any money going in that direction.

Moderator

Diane Kiesel, a former newspaper reporter, switched gears early on to become a lawyer. After a decade as a New York City prosecutor, she was appointed to the bench, where for nearly 25 years she served in the criminal term of the New York Supreme Court. She never strayed far from her journalistic roots, writing three books as a judge: Domestic Violence: Law, Policy and Practice, She Can Bring Us Home: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer and When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law. All were published by academic presses.

Panelists

Carl Rollyson, professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY, has published 18 biographies and several books about biography. His subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, Michael Foot, Sylvia Plath, Amy Lowell, Pablo Picasso, Marie Curie, Thurgood Marshall, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, and Ronald Colman. His forthcoming books are on presidential biography, Eve Arden, Sappho, and Herman Melville. He reviews biographies twice a week for the New York Sun.

Eric Brandt is a publishing executive with a PhD from Columbia University and over 30 years of experience in acquisitions and marketing at major trade publishers such as HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Basic Books, as well as at university presses including Columbia, Yale, and Stanford. In leadership positions, he has published New York Times best-selling books, created publicity campaigns for internationally renowned authors, secured grants for digital publishing initiatives, and worked to make existing books open access. Currently, he serves as the director of the University of Virginia Press.

Elizabeth Sherburn Demers is the director of Michigan State University Press. She has a Ph.D. in colonial American history from Michigan State University. She has had a long career with university and independent presses, including the University of Nebraska Press, Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan Press, Quarto Publishing Group, and Potomac Books. Elizabeth has co-authored and co-edited the biographical reference work, Icons of American Cooking with Victor Geraci, and the Encyclopedia of American Populism with Alexandra Kindell, both published by ABC-CLIO. A champion of biography, Elizabeth has published works by several BIO members. She splits her time between Detroit and Chicago.

ISSUES

The Sixties, Revisited
The 1960s were an era of profound social upheaval. With civil rights now under assault, with Robert F. Kennedy’s son spearheading a war on science, with right-wing podcasters promoting the use of psychedelics, how have our perspectives changed on the period historians designate “the long Sixties” (1955-1973)?

Moderator

Jude Webre is a political and intellectual historian with a particular interest in the intersection between creative expression and radical movements. He has taught at NYU and Columbia and served as a research assistant and consulting historian to Robert Caro.

Panelists

Susannah Cahalan is a journalist and the author of The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary (Viking). She is also the author of the memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (Free Press, 2012) and The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission that Changed Our Understanding of Madness (Grand Central, 2019).

Ru Marshall is a visual artist, novelist, and the author of American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. Their novel, A Separate Reality, was nominated for a Lambda Award for debut fiction. The recipient of the 2016 Hazel Rowley Prize from BIO, their writing has appeared in Salon, N + 1, The Kenyon Review, and The Evergreen Review.

Tamara Payne is the co-author, with her father Les Payen, of The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright), which received the Pulitzer Prize in biography, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Sam Tanenhaus is an historian and journalist and the author of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America (Random House), Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Modern Library), and Louis Armstrong: Musician (Chelsea House). He has served as the editor of The New York Times Book Review and as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He currently writes for Prospect.

4:00–5:00 PM

BASICS

Attention Must Be Paid: Writing about Forgotten Lives
This panel will look at the challenges and rewards of writing biographies of ordinary people, those remarkable though often obscure men and women who aspired to develop their creative abilities, express their deepest selves, and earn their livings doing so. All biographers of common people—persons unknown to us but whose lives typify their time and place—rely on limited sources, sparse and uneven records, fragments of information, and unusual evidence. They also highlight elements of familiar documents that have been overlooked by other historians. These materials do not always add up to a traditional biography—one based on personal papers and records—but the biographies they do form have something new to tell us.

Moderator

April F. Masten, a professor of American history at Stony Brook University, specializes in the labor history of the arts. She is the author of Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York (Penn Press, 2008), which recovers the experiences and aspirations of the thousands of young women who managed to study the visual arts and become professional artists in an emerging industrial society that extolled masculine genius and exploited women’s labor. She has also published essays on the Jacksonian-era genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer and on why we need to write biographies of artists’ models. Her recently published dual biography Diamond and Juba: The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge Dancing (University of Illinois Press, 2025), tells the story of Irish-American John Diamond and African-American William Henry Lane, better known as Juba, who achieved international fame in the mid-nineteenth century as rival champions in the art and sport of challenge dancing.

Panelists

Vincent DiGirolamo is associate professor of history at Baruch College and author of Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the Turner, Taft, Mott, Palmegiano, and DeSantis prizes in history. His work has appeared in Time magazine, the London Times, and the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle. His latest essay, “Slaves in the Salon: The Underside of Julius LeBlanc Stewart’s Belle Epoque,” examines the American-born artist’s centuries-long family involvement in Cuban sugar slavery. It was published in The Sweet Life: Julius LeBlanc Stewart and Painting the Belle Epoque (Giles, 2024). DiGirolamo is currently writing a biography of Gilded Age radical journalist John Swinton.

Eric K. Washington, a BIO board member, is an independent scholar. He wrote his debut biography, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal (Liveright, 2019), with support from the Leon Levy Center for Biography. The book won Columbia University’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize, the Guides Association of New York City’s Apple Award and special recognition from the Municipal Art Society’s Brendan Gill Prize committee. He chairs BIO’s annual Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, awarded for a biography-in-progress on an African American figure. He is now working on a biography of Harlem Renaissance-era actor Richard Huey and a group biography centered around the 19th-century Colored School No. 4, a recently city-designated landmark.

Richard Carlin is the author of over a dozen books, including biographies of jazz nightclub owner and record producer Morris Levy and composer-performer Eubie Blake, coauthored with Ken Bloom, as well as several histories of country music. He has produced ten albums of traditional music, now part of the Smithsonian/Folkways archives, and written many articles on popular music of the 20th century. In addition, he has been an acquisitions editor for music and arts books for over four decades. His latest research is on the life and times of Lottie Gee, the actress who starred in the groundbreaking black musical, Shuffle Along (1921).

CRAFT

Queering Biography
Whether chronicling the life of an LGBTQ person or writing as an LGBTQ author, queerness is a central theme for many biographers. Topics include the nitty-gritty of handling pronouns and name changes, overarching questions about describing historical figures’ lives with care, and how a queer POV can enrich biography.

Moderator

Julie Kliegman is a writer and editor with work in outlets including The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Slate, Bookforum, The Ringer, Defector, Texas Monthly, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and The Verge. Their forthcoming biography, Finding Renée Richards, chronicles the life and legacy of the transgender tennis player who successfully sued for her right to compete in the 1977 U.S. Open women’s draw. Kliegman’s first book was Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes. They live in Queens, New York.

Panelists

Cynthia Carr is the author, most recently, of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and BIO’s 2025 Plutarch Award. Her previous biography, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, won a Lambda Literary Award in 2013. Carr chronicled the work of contemporary artists as a Village Voice staff writer in the 1980s and 1990s (under the byline C.Carr). She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007 and was a fellow at The Leon Levy Center for Biography (2016-17).

Brad Gooch is a poet, novelist, and biographer whose latest book, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (Harper, 2024), was awarded the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir/Biography and is being developed as a TV series written and directed by Andrew Haigh. Forthcoming in June is his new memoir, Good Morning Moon: A Snapshot of an American Family. His previous books include Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, and the memoir Smash Cut. He is the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships. 

Evelyn C. White is the author of Alice Walker: A Life (2004). A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle and is widely published in the U.S. and Canada. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

BUSINESS

Life-Writing for Hire
Take a gander at any nonfiction bestseller list today. Chances are good that the celebrity or prominent politician whose name graces the covers employed the assistance of a ghostwriter. This practice extends to the growing phenomenon of self-publishing: Would-be authors not likely to land a traditional book deal (if they even wish to seek such a thing) seeking expert research, writing, and/or editing assistance to make order from the chaos of their personal papers. The kind of archival research and writing we do as biographers is, in other words, valuable to others.  In this panel, we’ll discuss the business and practice of life-writing for hire and how to monetize your skills.

Moderator

Lisa Napoli is a former journalist for The New York Times, MSNBC, and public radio’s Marketplace, as well as the author of four books—three biographies and one memoir. She recently completed her graduate degree in biography and memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center. In recent years, she’s taken to ghostwriting and editing and enjoys leading memoir-writing workshops.

Panelists

Kate Buford is a founder, along with Abby Santamaria, of Biography by Design, LLC, a company they created in 2016 to use their skills as published biographers to assist families, individuals, nonprofits, and corporations with biography projects and to create a revenue stream for themselves. Buford’s Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Knopf/Bison Books) was a 2010 Editors’ Choice of The New York Times, and her Burt Lancaster: An American Life (Knopf/Da Capo/Aurum UK) was named one of the best books of 2000 by the Times and other publications. She has also been a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition and APM’s Marketplace.

Madeleine Morel was born in England and moved to New York in 1977. As an established literary agent, she sold hundreds of book projects. In 1982, her varied experience in all areas of book publishing led her to establish 2M Communications Ltd, a literary agency specializing in nonfiction titles. She’s worked extensively with both established and first-time authors, creating, editing, and selling outlines and proposals to the major publishing houses. In her current role as a literary matchmaker, Morel has both a professional and an intuitive instinct for putting together the right people.

ISSUES

How 1776 Speaks to Us Today
The story of American history is constantly evolving as the work of biography uncovers long-overlooked lives and long-hidden documents and prompts important reconsiderations of so-called conventional wisdom. The roles of women, domestic lives, African Americans, and indigenous people have long been ignored in the telling of that history, for example. Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we know that the founding document was not frozen in time, and how it has been tested and reaffirmed over the centuries is an ongoing and vital part of its story as the backbone of all Americans’ freedom. This panel brings together three prominent biographers and historians to illustrate their experience as researchers, discoverers, and spirited, open-minded storytellers. 

Moderator

Steve Paul, BIO president, is a career journalist turned biographer of literary lives. His third biography, about the American poet William Stafford, is planned for publication in 2027 by Oregon State University Press.

Panelists

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. Published to ecstatic reviews, her Cleopatra: A Life was a #1 bestseller. Named one of the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, it has been translated into 35 languages and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. David McCullough greeted Schiff’s 2015 book, The Witches, also a #1 bestseller, as “brilliant from start to finish.” Schiff’s most recent book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, was a Wall Street Journal Top Ten Book of 2022 and figured as well on President Obama’s list of Favorite Books of 2022. The Wall Street Journal has called Schiff “perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America in our time.”

Amanda Vaill is the author of Pride and Pleasure, Hotel Florida, Somewhere, and the bestselling Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter, and her journalism and criticism have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Town & Country, and New York. A past fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Vaill lives in New York City.

Ted Widmer is the editor or author of eight books, including, most recently, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text. He has taught at CUNY, Brown, and Harvard, and directed research centers at Brown, Washington College, and the Library of Congress. A work he published in 2020, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington (Simon & Schuster), won several prizes.  

5:00–7:00 PM

Closing Reception, Graduate Center Concourse Lobby

Coaching Sessions

Face-to-face coaching sessions are available to conference participants who seek advice from an experienced biographer. Each session lasts 45 minutes and costs $50, paid directly to the coach. To request a coaching session, email a one-page description of your project along with a specific question or two to president@biographersinternational.org.