BIO will host the first major national conference on Black biography in over 40 years. Telling the Stories of Black Lives through Biography will be co-sponsored by Troy University-Montgomery, Alabama, and will take place on March 21-22, 2025. The conference will feature a full day of speakers, panel discussions, receptions, and other activities.

Telling the Stories of Black Lives through Biography is the brainchild of author and longtime BIO board member Ray Anthony Shepard, who says of the conference, “On March 21 and 22, 2025, as the nation begins to commemorate its founding, a cadre of biographers and biography enthusiasts will gather in Montgomery, Alabama, to consider this critical question: How can we honestly celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Republic without reckoning with the role of the slave system and its impact on America today? Montgomery is a symbolic forge of Black lives inside America—where the heat of slavery flamed, and the hammer of civil rights toughened the resolve of a 21st-century America.”

The conference keynote speaker will be A’Lelia Bundles, 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 by Scribner on June 10, 2025.

David Greenberg will also be a featured speaker at the conference. He is a professor of history and 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).

Learn more about the conference and register here.

Read the press release.