The Ray A. Shepard Award was presented at the 2022 BIO Conference to Anne Boyd Rioux, author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016) and Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018).  

The Shepard Award recognizes a BIO volunteer who has donated exceptionally of their time and talents for the benefit of the organization. It is named for Ray A. Shepard, a founding member of BIO who organized the first BIO Conference almost single-handedly. Rioux has served on BIO’s Board of Directors for five years. She has served as a co-chair for the BIO Conference Program Committee, and she is a member of the Membership Committee. She directs BIO’s Coaching Program and serves as a coach herself. 

While presenting the Shepard Award to Rioux, BIO President Linda Leavell said, “I first heard of Zoom from Anne, when she suggested that we conduct our board meetings that way, even before the pandemic happened.” She continued, “After we had to cancel the 2020 conference because of the pandemic, Anne suggested that we give BIO members an opportunity to meet online.” From this, Rioux initiated a series of workshops that summer on a range of topics, from marketing one’s book during the pandemic to copyright and fair use. This series of workshops has grown into BIO’s Online Events Committee, which Rioux now chairs. This past winter and spring, the committee hosted the “Reading Biography Like a Writer” series. “These workshops . . . provided BIO members a lifeline to our community during the pandemic,” Leavell said.  

Rioux also organized and supervised a series of online roundtables through BIO, which started in the summer of 2020. Leavell said, “In giving Anne the Ray Shepard Award, BIO recognizes her innovative ideas to keep BIO members connected with one another during the pandemic, and her extraordinary energy and talents in keeping those initiatives going.”  

Despite winning many awards in her career as a professor and writer, including four NEH fellowships, she said in her remarks, “I have never gotten an award quite like this, and it’s very moving.” She spoke of how, in the aftermath of the 2020 BIO Conference being canceled due to the pandemic, she was driven by a desire to keep members connected to each other. “Zoom was something that I got used to like everybody else,” she said, “but it was so easy to use and so easy for us to get together that way. I’m just really glad we’ve been able to stay connected. I think we’re even more connected now because of these periodic events. And I hope that this is a new tradition that BIO will continue, even once we’re meeting in person again, to keep us connected throughout the year.” 

 

Claudia Anderson, former supervisory archivist of the LBJ Presidential Library, received the 2022 Biblio Award, which is presented by BIO annually to recognize a librarian or archivist who has been especially helpful to biographers. Anderson was selected by BIO’s Awards Committee, which is chaired by Kai Bird and included Tim Duggan, Ruth Franklin, Peniel Joseph, Candice Millard, and Will Swift as members. “Library research is the core and the structure around which we create our narratives,” Swift said before introducing BIO Advisory Council member and longtime friend of the organization, Robert Caro, who presented the award as part of the 2022 BIO Conference proceedings. 

In acknowledging Anderson, Caro said, “I don’t know of a single Lyndon Johnson biography—and there have been a lot of them—that does not thank Claudia in the acknowledgments.” He continued, “You have to understand . . . the scope, the significance, of what Claudia does. . . . When I started working there [at the LBJ Presidential Library], they had 32 million documents, they said. But right now, they’re up to 44 million documents.” Caro said that he has watched Anderson take “one biographer after another” through a thorough explanation of “what’s in those boxes,” just as Anderson once explained it all to Caro himself. “For 44 years, she’s been helping me,” he said. “She’s really, I feel, a historian in the highest sense of the word. She knows, she’s made it her business to know, the archival material in her charge . . .  just as thoroughly as is possible for a single human being to know them.” Caro also praised Anderson for her “rare integrity and generosity of spirit.”  

In accepting the award, Anderson said, “It has been a personal and professional delight to work with the many LBJ biographers and other scholars that I’ve had the opportunity to meet during my career.” She recalled that when Robert Caro first came to the LBJ Presidential Library almost 45 years ago, she was the “young archivist assigned to guide him through Lyndon Johnson’s pre-presidential papers.” She thanked the entire team working at the LBJ archive in her acceptance speech.