Shennette Garrett-Scott and Fara Dabhoiwala are the recipients of the 2025 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, awarded for biographical works in progress that significantly advance our understanding of the Black experience. The selection committee was particularly struck by the engaging clarity of their prose and how these distinguished academics are bringing complex histories vividly to life for a broad readership.

Garrett-Scott won for her project, Titan: The Life of Maggie Lena Walker, a biography of the pioneering early 20th-century financier and civic leader. Dabhoiwala won for his project, Black Genius: In Search of Francis Williams, which explores the life of an Enlightenment-era polymath born to enslaved African parents in Jamaica at the close of the 17th century. Read more.

A distinguished panel of BIO judges recently announced the five books shortlisted for the 2025 Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. The winner will be announced at BIO’s annual conference in June. The titles are listed below in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Learn more. 

• Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr
• The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America by Stephanie Gorton
• John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg
• The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
• The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz

The clock is ticking for registration to the 2025 BIO Conference! Join more than 125 biographers at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, June 5, and Friday, June 6. Optional workshops and off-site tours at Howard University, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress are also available. Workshops and tours have limited space, so sign up early to guarantee your spot. Register here via Eventbrite. 

This year, topic-specific roundtables—traditionally held during lunch on the second day—will occur virtually approximately one week before the conference. Full program details are available here. 

Videos of panels and guest speakers from the first Black biography conference in nearly 40 years are now available in the members section of the BIO website. Watch them here.

• Conference Keynote: A’Lelia Bundles 
• “Looking Past Icons: Eyeing Unsung Figures as Vital Biography Subjects” 
• “Black Women’s Biographies and the Gaps They Fill” 
• Featured Speaker: David Greenberg 
• “Approaching Research/Filling in the Gaps” 
• “Writing Biography: A Discussion on Craft”

Ahead of the publication of BIO member and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow’s latest book, Mark Twain (Penguin Press, 2025), BIO held a special fundraising event on May 7, in New York City, at the home of David de Weese. Chernow, whose previous works include Washington: A Life (Penguin Press, 2010) and Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press, 2004), is also an esteemed member of BIO’s advisory council. Photos courtesy of Barbara Lehman Smith.

John Roberts’s double biography of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (Random House, 2024), was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. The other two finalists in the category were BIO members David Greenberg, for  John Lewis: A Life (Simon & Schuster, 2024), and Amy Reading, for The World She Edited: Katherine S. White at The New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024). Read more.

Harvard University is now the home of SlaveVoyages. This collaborative digital project provides public access to records of the largest slave trades in history, detailing the origins, forced relocations, destinations, rebellions, mortality, and perpetrators involved in the trafficking of over 12 million Africans across the Atlantic and hundreds of thousands within the Americas. Read more.

Diamond and Juba: The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge Dancing (John Diamond and William Henry Lane)
by April Masten
sold to the University of Illinois Press

American Marvel: Jack Kirby and the Comic Book Universes He Created
by Dan Nadel
sold to Scribner
by Elias Altman at Massie McQuilkin & Altman

Hated By All the Right People (Tucker Carlson)
by Jason Zengerle
sold to Crooked Media Reads
by Chris Parris-Lamb at The Gernert Company

View more here.

Introducing you to new members of BIO.

Amy Jordan is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Her teaching and research focus on the role of media in the lives of children and adolescents. She is working on a biography of Joan Ganz Cooney, the visionary behind Sesame Street.

Basil M. Baccouche, a medical student at Stanford University, is working on a biography, The End of Death, about pioneering heart surgeon Norman Shumway, which will be published in 2027.

Karen Karbiener has published two books about Walt Whitman. She is working on the first major Whitman biography in 26 years, American Kosmos: The Lives, Loves, and Worlds of Walt Whitman, which reassesses the 19th-century cultural icon from an attentive 21st-century perspective.