Biographers International Organization

Schedule

(Please note that all times are U.S. Central Daylight Time)

Friday, March 21

9 a.m. Registration opens. Sign up for one of two Legacy Museum tours. Other Equal Justice Initiative sites can be accessed at your leisure. A museum shuttle can transport attendees to a riverboat for access to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. The riverboat leaves every hour on the half-hour, 9:30 am – 4 pm.

10 a.m. Group 1 attends the Legacy Museum

1 p.m. Group 2 attends the Legacy Museum

5 p.m. – 7 p.m. Friday, March 21: Welcome reception at The NewSouth Bookstore, 105 S. Court Street, Montgomery, AL 36104.

Saturday, March 22

All sessions at Troy University – Montgomery, 231 Montgomery St.

8:30 a.m. Registration opens; coffee service

9 – 10 a.m. Conference Keynote: A’Lelia Bundles.

10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. Panel 1: “Looking Past Icons: Eyeing Unsung Figures as Vital Biography Subjects”: Rachel Swarns, Kevin McGruder, Eric K. Washington (moderator).

11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Panel 2: “Black Women’s Biographies and the Gaps They Fill”: Maryemma Graham, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tamara Payne (moderator).

12:45 p.m. – 2 p.m. Luncheon with featured speaker: David Greenberg

2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. Panel 3: “Approaching Research/Filling in the Gaps”: Hannah Durkin, Tanisha C. Ford, Carla Kaplan (moderator).

3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Panel 4: “Writing Biography: A Discussion on Craft”: Tamara Payne, Ray Anthony Shepard, Eric K. Washington, Steve Paul (moderator).

5 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. Reception and closing dinner.

Speakers

Keynote Speaker

A’Lelia Bundles, conference keynote speaker, is the author of 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 and the nonfiction inspiration for Self Made, the fictional Netflix/Warner Bros. series starring Octavia Spencer. Her latest book, Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, the first major biography of her great-grandmother, will be published on June 10, 2025 by Scribner.

She is the founder of the Madam Walker Family Archives and serves on several nonprofit boards including the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, the March On Festival, Biographer’s International Organization (BIO) and Columbia Global Reports. A former network television news executive and Emmy Award winning producer at ABC News and NBC News, she is a former chair of the National Archives Foundation and a former vice chair of Columbia University’s board of trustees.

 

Luncheon Speaker

David Greenberg, also a featured speaker, is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. His latest book, John Lewis: A Life (Simon & Schuster, 2024), has been called “panoramic and richly insightful” (Brent Staples, The New York Times) and a biography that “captures Lewis’s life, achievements, and times with heart-stopping precision” (Booklist). A Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, Cullman Center and  Leon Levy Center for Biography fellow, Greenberg is the author or editor of several books on American history and politics including Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (2003) and Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (2016). Formerly acting editor of The New Republic and columnist for Slate, he now writes regularly for Politico, Liberties, and many other scholarly and popular publications. He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and a BA from Yale University.

 

Panelists and Moderators

Hannah Durkin is an historian whose most recent book, The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade (2024), about the Africans trafficked on the last US slave ship (Mobile Bay,1860), was named an Amazon Best Book of 2024, one of the Washington Post’s “50 Notable Works of Nonfiction,” a New Yorker recommended book, and shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Nonfiction Crown Award. Durkin is an advisor to the History Museum of Mobile, which memorializes the Clotilda survivors, and the Clotilda Descendants Association, which traces survivors’ descendants, and has received more than a dozen academic prizes.

 

Tanisha Ford is an NAACP Image award-winning writer, cultural critic, and Professor of History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her most recent book, Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement (2023) explores the Black women who raised millions of dollars for social justice causes. Other books include Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (2019) and Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (2015). Ford teaches courses on history, biography, memoir, social movements, girlhood studies, and is one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans, among numerous other awards.

 

Maryemma Graham is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas and is the author of The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is a founder of the History of Black Writing Research Center. Through her work at HBW, she has led initiatives that promote research, teaching, and public engagement with Black literary studies. She received an American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement (2021). Her books include The Cambridge History of African American Literature, Teaching African American Literature, and the translingual volume Toni Morrison: Au delà du visible ordinaire/Beyond the Visible and Ordinary. She is currently working on the Cambridge History of the African American Novel with Keith Gilyard and her memoir.

 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024). She is a queer Black feminist love evangelist, and has written four earlier books, including Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals which won the 2022 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry, the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a National Humanities Center Fellowship. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is currently working on her next book in honor of June Jordan and Fannie Lou Hamer, A Homemade Field of Love (forthcoming from Yale University Press).

 

Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University, is a BIO board member and the author of Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (Harper Collins 2013) and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (Doubleday/Anchor 2023), and the editor of Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novels, Quicksand and Passing, among other works. She is the recipient of an NEH “Public Scholar” and a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been a Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center, the W.E.B. DuBois Center, and elsewhere, and was Founding Director of the Northeastern University Humanities Center. She is a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

 

Kevin McGruder is Associate Professor of History at Antioch College and the author of Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021), which was called a “timely and important biography” (Khalil Gibran Muhammad) of a pioneering businessman. In 2024 he was awarded BIO’s Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for Rudolph Fisher: Harlem’s Interpreter, a biography in progress about the influential Harlem Renaissance-era writer. His keen interest in urban history focusing on racial residential patterns produced the meticulously researched book, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1920 (2015), and his interest in LGBTQ history led to his editorship of Home at Last: The Collected Writings of AIDS Journalist LeRoy Whitfield (Fire Press, 2022).

 

Steve Paul is president of BIO and is now at work on his third literary biography. He’s a career journalist, a longtime book critic, and a magazine columnist whose subjects range across the arts, American culture, and books. A native of New England, he has long lived and worked in Kansas City, MO.

 

Tamara Payne, a BIO board member, is co-author of The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright, 2020). She worked with her late father, the award-winning and New York-based print journalist Les Payne, to co-write The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X. This biography of the charismatic and controversial Muslim leader known as Malcolm X earned a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

 

Ray Anthony Shepard, a founding board member of BIO, is the author of A Long Time Coming (Calkins Creek Books, 2023).

 

Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author and associate professor of journalism at New York University and a contributing writer for The New York Times. In 2021 she was the inaugural winner of BIO’s Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for her then biography in progress, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (Random House, 2023). Her book won the 2024 American Book Award and the 2024 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers. In 2023 and 2024 she was elected to the Society of American Historians and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, respectively. Her other books include American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (2012).

 

Eric K. Washington, a BIO board member, is a historian and author. His debut biography, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal (Liveright, 2019), was lauded as “an illuminating chronicle” (Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal) that invoked “a fitting exemplar of Harlem’s ambitious Black middle class” (Publishers Weekly). His book won Columbia University’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship of New York History, the Guides Association of New York City’s GANYC Apple Award and special recognition from the Municipal Art Society of New York’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.

Lodging

BIO has reserved rooms at the Staybridge Suites, 275 Lee Street, in downtown Montgomery (334-532-0700) at a group rate significantly cheaper than rates of other comparable hotels on Thursday and Friday nights, March 21 and 22, 2025.

After you click the link above:

Enter group block dates 3/20-23, 2025

Drop down screen under Rate Preference – unclick are you a Travel agent? It will then say no

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Fill out the information.

Rooms are $189 double and $169 single plus tax. Reserve before Feb. 15 to get the group rate. The hotel is one block from the conference facilities at Troy University-Montgomery.

If driving, email here to arrange free parking at the university. And also email Kirk Curnutt if you have any questions or issues about the hotel reservation process.