Registration for the fifth annual Compleat Biographer conference opens this month. All BIO members will be notified by email when the registration site is open for business. Active BIO members will also receive information on using their member’s discount as well as how to obtain the early-bird registration rate.

The 2014 conference will be held May 16 to 18 at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the site of the first conference and the founding of BIO. Unlike the first, simpler conference, this fifth gathering will include a full day of research workshops in the Boston area on May 16, followed by an evening reception; twenty panel sessions on May 17 along with a luncheon address by the 2014 BIO Award winner (who will be announced in January); our popular networking reception at which the Plutarch Award winner will be revealed; and four master classes on May 18.

“As in past years, our panels deal with the entire process of writing a biography: research, writing, publishing and marketing,” Cathy Curtis, chair of the Program Committee, told TBC. “What’s new is a special emphasis on what my committee likes to call the ‘core curriculum’—the information beginning biographers need as they contemplate choosing a subject and embarking on years of research and writing.”

In addition, conference organizers continue to broaden BIO’s reach to embrace nontraditional forms and subject matter, including group biographies and biographies of marginalized gay subjects. “And because we are convening in Boston,” added Curtis, “we’re devoting a panel to a discussion of biographical subjects whose lives were inseparable from the city of their greatest triumphs.”
A preliminary description of the panels may be seen here.