Biographers International Organization

Podcast #191 – Patti Hartigan

October 18th, 2024

This week we interview Patti Hartigan, award-winning journalist and author of August Wilson: A Life. This biography, Hartigan’s first, about the legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who powerfully and poetically chronicled African American life in the 20th century, was published in August 2023 by Simon & Schuster. Hartigan has had a long career at the Boston Globe where she served as arts reporter, drama critic, and cultural columnist. Her work has appeared in numerous publications,… Read More »

Podcast #188 – Kenneth Miller

September 27th, 2024

This week we interview award-winning journalist and author Kenneth Miller about his first biography, Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep. It was published in October 2023 by Hachette Books. Miller is a contributing editor for Discover, and his work has appeared in Time, Life, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Aeon, and many other publications. Miller’s honors include the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine… Read More »

Podcast #178 – Judith Tick

May 17th, 2024

This week we interview Judith Tick, a Matthews Distinguished Professor Emerita at Northeastern University in Boston, and an award-winning author. Her latest book, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song, explores the life of one of the 20th century’s greatest jazz vocalists. It was published by W. W. Norton and Company in January of this year. In addition, Tick’s co-edited anthology (with Jane Bowers), Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, … Read More »

Podcast #158 – Justin Martin

December 29th, 2023

This week, we interview author Justin Martin, who specializes in meticulously researched and engagingly delivered American history books. His most recent, A Fierce Glory: Antietam, the Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery, was published by Da Capo Press in September 2018. This group biography is about Antietam—a turning point in the Civil War—in which Martin emphasizes character development over troop movements and portrays key figures both on and off the battlefield on that… Read More »

Podcast #149 – Caleb Gayle

October 27th, 2023

This week we feature award-winning journalist and author Caleb Gayle, who writes about the history of race and identity. His latest book, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity and Power (Riverhead Books, June 2023), is about Black members of the indigenous Creek Nation. It was awarded the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award. Gayle’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian… Read More »

Podcast #143 – Jonny Steinberg

September 15th, 2023

This week we interview Jonny Steinberg, author of Winnie and Nelson Mandela: Portrait of a Marriage, published by Knopf in May 2023. Steinberg has written several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and he is a two-time winner of South Africa’s premier nonfiction award and an inaugural winner of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize. Steinberg served as professor of African Studies at Oxford University and currently… Read More »

Podcast #139 – E. James West

June 23rd, 2023

This week we interview E. James West, a historian and lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies and Cultures at England’s University College of London. He also serves as co-director of the Black Press Research Collective based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. West has authored three books, most recently Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr., published in July 2022 as a part of the African American Intellectual History series from the… Read More »

Podcast #135 – Chad Williams

May 26th, 2023

This week we interview Chad Williams, the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. His latest book, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War, was published in April 2023 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Williams specializes in African American and modern US History, African American military history, the World War I era and African American intellectual history. Also,… Read More »