Biographers International Organization

Podcast #153 – Edward O’Shea

November 24th, 2023

This week we interview Edward O’Shea, a State University of New York at Oswego Emeritus English Professor and author of Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey. Published by Routledge Press in December 2022, this biography explores the 40 years that Irish poet Seamus Heaney spent in America. O’Shea has served as a Fulbright Fellow at Presidency College in Kolkata, India, and he was a Fulbright Specialist at Trinity College in Dublin. During that appointment, he made presentations… Read More »

Podcast #150 – Ilyon Woo

November 3rd, 2023

This week we interview Ilyon Woo, the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, published by Simon & Schuster in January 2023. This biography details the story of Ellen and William Craft who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise. Woo also authored The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, and her articles have appeared in… Read More »

Podcast #128 – Andrew Nagorski

April 7th, 2023

This week we interview Andrew Nagorski, an award-winning journalist and author of Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom, published by Simon and Schuster in August 2022. Nagorski spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek, and he is the author of eight books, including Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power and The Nazi Hunters. Nagorski gained international notoriety when the Soviet government, angered… Read More »

Podcast Episode #111 – Winston James

December 9th, 2022

This week we interview Winston James, author of Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik, published by Columbia University Press in July 2022. A Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, James also authored, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America, winner of the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship from the Caribbean Studies Association. His three other books examined pioneering Pan-Africanist writer… Read More »

Podcast Episode #106 – Bernice Lerner

November 4th, 2022

This week we interview Bernice Lerner, a senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility. Her latest book is a dual biography of a high-ranking British military doctor during World War II, and Lerner’s mother, Rachel Genuth, a poor Jewish teenager from the Hungarian provinces and Holocaust survivor. The book, All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, was published by Johns Hopkins University… Read More »

Podcast Episode #100 – Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink

September 23rd, 2022

This week we interview Gwendolyn Mink and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, co-authors of Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress, published by New York University Press in May 2022. This book explores the life and accomplishments of Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman elected to U.S. House of Representatives, and a dedicated advocate for Title IX legislation and opposition to the Vietnam War. Gwendolyn Mink, Patsy Mink daughter’s,… Read More »

Podcast Episode #96 – Paulina L. Alberto

June 24th, 2022

This week we interview Paulina L. Alberto, an Argentine-born historian of Afro-Latin America and Professor of History, Spanish, and Portuguese at the University of Michigan. Her biography, Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Modern Argentina, was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2022. As the author of Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil, she received the Roberto Reis Prize for Best… Read More »

Podcast Episode #94 – Kathleen Stone

May 27th, 2022

This week we interview Kathleen Stone, a Boston-based lawyer whose reviews, essays and have appeared in MS Magazine, Arts Fuse, Ploughshares, Pangyrus, The Timberline Review, Los Angeles Review of Books and Grist. She also co-hosts Booklab, a literary salon in Boston. Stone’s biography, her first, explores the lives of seven remarkable women from a wide range of backgrounds. They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men, was published in… Read More »