Several panels on a wide range of topics pertaining to the craft of biography will be presented at the annual BIO Conference in June. Here are the ideas behind just a few of the panels. If you want to learn even more, be sure to check out the panel descriptions on the BIO website.

My experience with choosing a subject like the mysterious polymath Connie Converse to investigate for my first book made me wonder—How have other first-time biographers tackled the challenge of telling the story of people who lived similarly opaque lives?  How did they grapple with the unknown and did that become part of the narrative for them? For this panel, I’m thrilled by the prospect of a conversation peopled by the ghosts of Edward Hopper, Robert Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Gertrude Hoffman, and Converse—an extraordinary cross-section of fascinating and hard-to-know American pioneers.

The idea for the panel “The Unreliable Narrative Source: Coping with Essential but Untrustworthy Sources” emerged when I commiserated with speaker Alison Owings about my biographical subject’s distortions and secrets and her subject’s unfettered hyperbole. Panelists will explore coping with mixtures of self-protective falsehoods, myths, confessional soul-baring, and yawning omissions, found in interviews, historical records, and publications. Attendees will gain insight into finding a balance: how do we weave coherent, engaging narratives that accurately portray flawed sometimes deliberately misleading people?

In organizing this panel, I wanted to celebrate the defining role Black music has played in American culture and the exciting recent work being done to illuminate the lives of these unsung heroes. Topics include the use of recorded sound archives, oral history, the importance of place, the intersection of politics and the arts, and other issues specific to the particular challenges of music biography but relevant to all biographers. We will discuss—and listen to—pivotal hip-hop group De La Soul, children’s music pioneer Ella Jenkins, revolutionary spoken-word artist Gil Scott-Heron, and intergenerational blues women.

As one half (with Susannah Hollister) of a two-author team several years into working— or co-working—on a biography of poet Kenneth Koch, I jumped at the chance to moderate the upcoming panel on “Co-authored Biography,” featuring Kai Bird, Andrew S. Curran, and Allison Gilbert. The panel was Allison’s idea, growing out of curiosity and conversations sparked by Listen World!, her 2022 biography of journalist Elsie Robinson (written with Julia Scheeres). Co-authored biography is rare enough to raise questions. But this way of working can provide practical and intellectual benefits, make possible projects that otherwise wouldn’t be, and make them more fun. The writers on this panel offer stellar proof that co-authorship can also produce excellent books. I’m looking forward to an exchange on the ins and outs of co-authorship: What does it look like in practice? What are the challenges and advantages of researching and writing in conversation with another person? How can co-authorship add to our encounters with our subjects and build on the social nature of biography?

Just like athletes, biographies of sports figures come in all shapes and sizes, from stand-alone life stories to team portraits to the telling of key moments in sports history.  Panelists Madeleine Blais, Ashley Brown, Samuel G. Freedman and Andrew Maraniss will share insights from their own work as a jumping off point to explore larger questions about the role of sports in modern American culture and how questions of race, class, and gender play out on the field. They will also discuss the similarities and differences of writing about athletic lives compared to other biographical subjects and the specific challenges and rewards of writing about people in sports for trade, academic, and young adult audiences. As sports touch practically every aspect of American life, it promises to be a wide-ranging discussion.

On March 22, 2025, BIO held a conference in Montgomery, Alabama entitled “Telling the Stories of Black Lives Through Biography.” It was the first conference of its kind since the 1980s, where biographers came together to discuss the joys and challenges of creating biographies of Black subjects through panels, site tours, and speakers. At the conference, A’Lelia Bundles delivered a keynote which attendees described as nothing short of inspirational. An excerpt of her speech is below. A video of her keynote can be seen here.

by A’Lelia Bundles

I’ve had a feeling all along that this was going to be a special gathering of kindred spirits, but now I am convinced that it will prove to be both special and historic as we create new relationships and strengthen old ties. I’m confident that the ripples will continue for decades. Perhaps in 2050, someone will write an article about the dozens of biographies that were published by people who are here in this room. And some young writer will come across the selfies and the group photos and be inspired to write his or her own books.

There is joy and a sense of purpose this morning.

But we also know that we are gathering at a particularly fraught time when history is being erased and when facts are disposable. When the people we write about are being expunged from government websites and universities are being told that the topics we teach and write about are now illegal.

Part of Ray Shepherd’s motivation for bringing the conference to Montgomery was to link the 60th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March with next year’s 250th commemoration of the Declaration of Independence. Both events are significant milestones in America’s quest to form a more perfect union and to live up to its ideals. The Founding Fathers – with their brilliance and with their flaws – surely did not expect the semi-quen-centennial celebration of their grand experiment to coincide with a Constitutional crisis and the biggest internal threat to democracy since the Civil War.

But the beauty of this weekend is that we are fortifying ourselves with each conversation. We are declaring that our stories have meaning and value. We are supporting each other with encouragement and advice. 

We know that if we do not tell these stories and write them down, they will be lost. We are compelled to do the digging and excavation and ferreting out because the ancestors insist!!! And because the grandchildren and nieces and nephews need us to do this work.

While planning the conference, Eric Washington found the transcript from a May 1986 Black biography symposium where eight biographers – including Nell Irvin Painter who is with us today – gathered at City College in New York. They were there at the invitation of James Hatch, a City College English professor who then was working on a biography of poet and playwright Owen Dodson. Among the eight speakers was Robert Hemenway (whose Zora Neale Hurston biography had been published in 1979)…Nell (whose Narrative of Hosea Hudson also had been published in 1979)…Thadious Davis (whose Nella Larsen biography would be published ten years later)…Arnold Rampersad, whose first volume of his two volume Langston Hughes biography had been published a few months earlier in June…and John A. Williams (author of the masterful novel The Man Who Cried I Am, who had recently been told by a publisher that there would likely be no interest in the biography he was proposing about Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall).

The title of the conference, “The Challenges of Writing Black Biography,” reflected the state of the genre and of the publishing industry. Those of us who were alive then remember that it was still quite rare for Knopf or Random House or Simon & Schuster to publish books by Black authors or about topics related to African Americans. There were long dry spells between the publication of a Toni Morrison novel, an Audre Lord collection, an Alice Walker novel, or a Paula Giddings history.

Those eight biographers who met in 1986 were on the cusp of what would become an explosion of Black biographies, memoirs and autobiographies. They knew and we know that those stories were always there. They just weren’t being published by the big publishing houses.

African American self-told accounts began to appear most notably in 1760 with the publication of “A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon.” 19th century classics like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were followed by 20th century autobiographies Ida B. Wells’s Crusade for Justice, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, which I learned during my research sold three million copies in 1965.

Through those 18th and 19th century narratives, it is as if our ancestors were speaking themselves into existence and guaranteeing that they not be forgotten. Having lived their lives when it was illegal for them to read and write and a crime for them to be taught to read and write, they found a way to tell their stories in what surely must have felt like an act of rebellion. Whether it was through Phillis Wheatley’s poems and the Fisk Jubilee Singers spirituals, or Dave the Potter’s signed stoneware and Ashley’s sack, or family Bibles and Gee’s Bend quilts, the impulse to assert one’s humanity always has been irrepressible.

So at a moment when one could be pessimistic and discouraged, I’m declaring right now that we are going to continue to do the work of writing biography and of doing the research that upends conventional wisdom. We are going to continue to challenge the lies that diminish our humanity and to resist the misinformation that somehow our story is not the quintessential American story. 

by Michael Vinson

Imagine a group of academic biographers drinking at some past convention, and they see Evan Connell and John McPhee walk into their bar. Assume for this story they recognize Connell and McPhee (and that Connell has been resurrected!) It would be a pretty fair bet that most would look with jealousy on their books’ sales.

Evan S. Connell achieved critical acclaim for his fiction, but when he turned to biography, his book on Custer, Son of the Morning Star (North Point Press, 1984), shot to the top of the bestseller lists. John McPhee is also legendary for his best-selling nonfiction books. Even though most of his books are not considered straight-up biographies, biographers can learn a lot from his narrative, nonfiction techniques.

I think I understand a little of why academic biographers are jealous of best-selling non- specialists and journalists. When Evan Connell’s biography of Custer came out, Robert Utley, a distinguished historian with his own book about Custer, dismissed Connell’s book as a “vast, rambling potpourri.” Aside from the association of Connell’s book with scented bowls on toilet tanks, I suppose Utley meant that Son of the Morning Star was abundant in detail but with little structure or thesis. I will return to Connell’s biography later, and McPhee’s approach as well, and argue that the “potpourri” method was one of Connell’s great hidden strengths. It might be the very reason his and McPhee’s books remained atop the bestseller lists. Interestingly, the basis of their approach fits nicely into a new French school of thinking about writing history.

When I studied history in graduate school, we talked about the tension between academic biographies and bestsellers written by journalists. For most academic historians, biographies are considered “good” not by their readability but by the social science generalizations that can be applied to them. As it happens, the “social science-ization” of historians’ books coincided with the loss of readers for their monographs.

The first historians with doctoral degrees to teach in America learned to use social science generalizations in German graduate schools. Today, the assumption that history and biography should be written as a generalization of social scientific principles is still widely taught to history graduate students. This approach was derived from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of categorization (or more precisely, “transcendental idealism”). While academic historians rarely talk about their reliance on Kant, their methods of writing still follow the same rules.

For example, an academic historian reviewing a biography of Abelard and Heloise might say: “This book gives us a firm grasp of how some French elites dealt with religious barriers to relationships and identity in late medieval Paris.” The Kantian formula of categorization (or generalization) consists of identifying the time (late medieval), place (Paris), and then an intellectual categorization (French elites and religious barriers to relationships). If you got this far in this paragraph, you might very well wonder how far you would get in the actual biography. 

Even today with the new (and welcome) academic and cultural emphasis on racial and gender diversity and inclusion, the same social science parameters of categorization are still applied. The new academic biographies are judged by the same three general parameters: a time period, a location, and an intellectual category, which now is expanded to previously overlooked persons of color or of an alternative gender.

What the social-scientific approach gained in uniformity across graduate schools, it lost in public readership of their books. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote bestselling histories and biographies (such as Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus). In an essay for historians, Morison lamented the state of the craft. The reading public was largely unaware of their prolific output, because historians “have neglected the literary aspects of their craft.” Morison wanted to see “a few more Ph.D.s in history winning Book of the Month Club adoptions and reaping a harvest of dividends.”

The calls for a revival of narrative in academic biographies have continued. James West Davidson reviewed the state of the field of academic biography and history around the same time that Connell’s book on Custer was published. Davidson argues that historians and biographers have adapted too readily to the methods of social science generalizations.

Davidson believed that if a contemporary historian could be duped into reviewing Huckleberry Finn as though it were a monograph, the historian might write something along these lines: “Samuel Clemens, with bold audacity, has given us a minute account of the wanderings of a mid-19th-century American adolescent, and by it has sought to demonstrate the inherent emotional conflicts in a society dominated by a caste system based upon race.” To review Huckleberry Finn with the social scientist’s Kantian formula of period and geography coupled with an intellectual categorization is to miss the point of Clemens’s book entirely. In many ways, though, this is exactly what academic authors of biographies have done over and over.

Like Morison, Davidson’s solution to the bland social-scientific generalizations of biography and history called for the books to be treated as “literary endeavors.” By this he meant far more than the usual call to returning writing via a “nuts and bolts, Strunk and White level of crafting clear prose.” Instead, the art of Twain’s narrative was tied to a specificity that made Huck Finn both unique as an individual and also relatable to a wide readership. Davidson notes that there is a “markedly different justification for specificity that harks back to a more primitive human response—simple curiosity, in and for itself.” 

Ernest Hemingway knew the importance of specificity in connecting a reader to the emotion of the experience. In his advice to writers, he took as an example the thrill of catching a fish. “If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping, remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. . . . Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you had.” Wise words, Ernest, and easier said than done, but what of value isn’t?

Part two of this article will appear in the May 2025 issue of The Biographer’s Craft. 

——

BIO member Michael Vinson has worked in the rare books trade for over 30 years. He is the author of Bluffing Texas Style: The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers of Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

by Aleta George

I write this from Kaneohe on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The trade winds blow through office windows that look out on the jagged Ko’olau Range. The desk at which I am working belongs to the grandson of a primary character in my biography about Jack London and San Francisco Bay. My host’s “grandpa” was Yoshimatsu Nakata, London’s longtime valet, first mate, and surrogate son.

I am on a two-month writing retreat. While this retreat is extra special, it is an example of the type of writing retreat I have given myself for years: When friends and family go on vacation, I retreat to their houses and write.

Most people associate writing retreats with residency programs. (Here’s a list of free or low cost residency programs by Electric Literature). For example, I once launched a project during a month-long residency at Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks, where I studied my subject and swam in the lake every day. As the leaves started to change color at the end of September, the mail carrier told me, “We don’t do that here.”

Bio member Iris Jamahl Dunkle, whose most recent book is Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024), loved her retreats at Vermont Studio Center and Millay Arts, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s historic estate in the Hudson Valley. Iris explained why in her acknowledgements:

Both of these places filled me with inspiration (the Gihon River’s icing over, then the ice suddenly breaking and flowing past, the ghost of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the moss-covered walk to her grave), but it was the artists I met in these creative places who helped me see my project differently.

Bio member William Souder shared his experience of a retreat:

I wrote the first chapter of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020) at Marsha Dowler’s guest house in Seaside, Florida. It was February of 2016, and I was a fellow in the annual retreat for writers and artists called “Escape to Create.” Sponsored by Seaside’s enlightened citizens, the month-long program puts you up at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico to work and think and walk the endless beach. Evenings often ended at the curved bar of the Great Southern [Café] over oysters and conversation with my new friend and fellow escapee, a singer-songwriter from Nashville named Jeff Black, with whom I had nothing and everything in common. Those days. Those nights.

Residency programs are great but there is another path to give yourself the gift of concentrated writing, and that is the way that led me to Kaneohe. It’s simple, with no application or competition required. When friends and family go on a trip, I lug my materials to their homes in San Francisco, Berkeley, or Gilroy, California (or in this case, across the ocean to Oahu), and work without the distractions that come with being at home. Yes, I walk the dog, clean the kitty litterbox, and put the chickens in a coop at night, but these are minor chores compared to the rewards. Separation from your own living space results in concentrated writing time that can help you go deeper and make connections, get more work done, and form new habits. 

Here in Kaneohe, I have established a new routine. I go to bed early and wake up naturally before dawn. While the coffee is brewing, I shun my phone with its distracting emails and disturbing news. Instead, I do five sun salutations and read a poem. I got the poem idea from editor Susan Leon at the most recent Biography Lab. (I was here in Oahu during the Lab and that afternoon found a Poem a Day book in my host’s bathroom.) Serendipity can happen on a writing retreat.

More than a decade ago, while working on a biography of the poet Ina Coolbrith, I was on a retreat at a friend’s house in Berkeley, California. One day on my routine lunchtime walk in the residential hills, I discovered a cluster of paths, stairways, and streets named after literary men I had been writing about that morning! Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Mark Twain were represented, but where was Ina? The byways were all named after men, most of whom had left California, whereas Ina had stayed and become California’s first poet laureate. To include her, I recited her poetry on subsequent walks. When the book was finished, I gave a reading at a Berkeley bookstore and suggested that Harte could afford to give up one of his four byways. Several local groups heeded the call and, after a year, they changed the name of Bret Harte Lane to Ina Coolbrith Path and installed a handsome biography plaque at the bottom of the stairway.

Serendipity can happen, but poop also happens when there are dogs, cats, bunnies, and chickens involved. It is unlikely that you, like me, will get locked in a chicken coop at dusk without your phone for 30 minutes before discovering the string that sets you free, or that you will have a naughty beagle that growls at your host’s puppy at mealtime. You will, however, like me leave the dishes in the sink, cook when you feel like it, and remain un-showered for days in order to put your writing first.

My writing retreats usually last from five days to two weeks, so how is it that I get to stay at this comfortable and quiet home in Kaneohe for two whole months? I met my host by letter and then visited him and his wife in Kaneohe last year. They graciously showed me family photos and we paid our respect at Nakata’s grave (everyone called him Nakata, not Yoshimatsu). Back at home in California, I shared all my research about Nakata with his grandson. He was grateful because although as a boy he knew his grandpa, they never talked about Nakata’s early years with London. After leaving London’s employ, Nakata became a dentist and lived a long and fruitful life in Honolulu. 

Last summer, my hosts visited Jack London State Park in Glen Ellen, California. I arranged for a docent to show them around and joined them. As we drove around the park in a bumpy golf cart, I mentioned my writing retreats. I wasn’t thinking about their home in Oahu, but they latched onto the idea. They wanted to travel and, as they are happily supportive of my project, the plan blossomed from there.

Today, they are in India and I am in Kaneohe. The wall behind my host’s desk is covered with framed family photos. At top center is a photo of Nakata as a fit and healthy old man. He looks kind and quietly satisfied with his life. I cannot help but smile when I glance at him, surrounded by photos of his progeny. I feel pride for this Issei who came to Hawaii as a Japanese immigrant and who at 17 signed on as London’s cabin boy aboard the Snark in Hilo, Hawaii. I thank Nakata for the pivotal role he played in the last years of London’s life and for making me feel at home in Kaneohe.

——

Aleta George is a BIO member and journalist who focuses on the nature, history, and culture of California. She is the author of the award-winning biography Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California’s First Poet Laureate (Shifting Plates Press, 2015).

What is your current project and at what stage is it?

I am writing a biography of Conrad Hilton, the founder of the Hilton hotel chain, and I am about three quarters of the way through. Though I have already written several books about food history, this is my first biography. I try to explain how Hilton helped to create the modern hospitality industry and how that made him rich but also famous. He was one of the first celebrity entrepreneurs, a type we see a lot of today. It has been really interesting to discover how he created his persona in relation to his business. Gossip columnists reported on his dates with Hollywood stars but also his deals. Hilton loved attention so there is lots of material to work with.

What person would you most like to write about?

After this book, I would love to write about Martha Stewart because she has had such a lasting influence on how people think about their domestic lives. I realize, though, that writing about a perfectionist would be very daunting.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

I loved visiting New Mexico to walk around the tiny town where Hilton grew up. When I got there, I understood the uniqueness of the landscape as a potential key to his sense of limitless possibility. Another great moment was finding the set of perfumes that Hilton hotels created for female guests in the 1960s on eBay. I had seen them in an archive but hadn’t been allowed to smell them (for good reasons, of course!). Getting my own set helped me to establish some of the sensory history of the hotels, which can be really hard to access.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

I think, like most historians, I am frustrated that more people don’t keep every scrap of paper. But a unique frustration of writing hotel history is that hotels constantly remodel, so it is very hard to get a sense of what an interior looked and felt like in the past. You can find lots of pictures of hotel exteriors and some of dining rooms, but very few of guest rooms and almost none of the back-of-house spaces.

One research/marketing/attitudinal tip to share?

There is at least one industry journal for every business you can imagine and they are fascinating! I found a journal specifically for people running hotels in the Catskills in the 1930s and 1940s. It is half in Yiddish. I was not able to weave it into my book, but I hope someone else will make use of it.

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?

I am very lucky in that I have my dream job, directing the Food Studies Programs at Boston University, where we work to integrate hands-on and academic thinking about food. Great conversations, great snacks. 

——

Megan Elias is a historian whose work and research explores the rich history of food and culture through prisms of food writing, markets, and home economics. She has written several books about food history, including Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).