Robert Weil to Receive BIO Editorial Excellence Award

Robert Weil follows Nan Talese, Jonathan Segal, and Robert Gottlieb as a winner of the Editorial Excellence Award.

Robert Weil, editor-in-chief and publishing director of Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton, will receive BIO’s fourth annual Editorial Excellence Award on Wednesday, November 8, at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York.

Weil’s celebrated publishing career began in 1978 at Times Books. He became senior editor at St. Martin’s Press in 1988; a decade later, he moved to W. W. Norton as executive editor. Named to his present positions in 2011, he is dedicated to editing books of consequence.

Weil will speak on “Biography as Reclamation.” He will be introduced by Annette Gordon-Reed, author of “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

In addition, a panel of leading biographers, moderated by Linda Gordon (winner of the Bancroft Prize for Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits), will talk about their experience working with Weil. Here is the list of panelists:
  • Ruth Franklin, winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award and BIO’s Plutarch Award for Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
  • David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and 2001 for both volumes of his biography of W. E. B. Dubois
  • Max Boot, author of the forthcoming The Road Not Taken: Edward Landsdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
  • Yunte Huang, winner of the 2011 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Book for Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
This event represents the first collaboration between BIO and the Levy Center for Biography. The event begins at 6:30 p.m. and will be held in the Skylight Room at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue. Hors doeuvres and beverages will be served. Tickets are free, but seating is limited, so reservations are essential. Click here to reserve your seat.