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 conclusion of a two-part conversation at BIO’s 2026 conference in New York City with fellow biographer and BIO member John A. Farrell.