This celebrated author received the Biographers International Organization’s 2026 BIO Award – an annual and prestigious recognition of individuals who have made significant contributions to the art and craft of biography. Stiles’ Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Spur Award for Best Western Biography, and the William H. Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, and the California Book Award. He also wrote The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, winner of the 2003 Ambassador Book Award. T.J. Stiles is currently working on a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and this is the first of a two-part conversation at BIO’s 2026 conference in New York City with fellow biographer and BIO member John A. Farrell.