As part of the 2022 BIO Conference, Megan Marshall, winner of the annual BIO Award, delivered the Keynote Address. In a prerecorded video, BIO Board member Natalie Dykstra, author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), introduced Marshall and commended her as “a writer who has done so much to shape the world of biography for readers and writers, both now and into the future.”

The address was filmed at the Dowse Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, where Marshall said she “worked at becoming a biographer through the 1980s and 90s, while researching The Peabody Sisters. . . . The staff welcomed me, a novice researcher, offered me a desk, where I sat with my nearly silent portable typewriter, transcribing letters and diaries from the Peabody and Horace Mann papers, making my way through a tsunami of documentary evidence.” She also said, “Thank you, MHS. This award is shared with you.”

In her speech, Marshall addressed her audience as the “lucky survivors” who had lived through a host of recent traumas. She said, “As I speak now, in late April, close to one million Americans have died from COVID-19 in a little more than two years. Tens of thousands have died in Ukraine since Putin’s invasion in late February. The count of Black lives lost to the civil war that never ends would rightly include all those martyred in the lynchings and massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those killed slowly in poverty, those now sacrificed to police and vigilante justice. Waves of hate-inspired killings take the lives of too many from all vulnerable populations: ethnic, racial, religious, LGBTQ, schoolchildren, who may reasonably fear their vulnerability to violence will never be alleviated. We may not know what to do about this carnage, this pervasive assault on humanity, which is inseparable from humanity’s assault on our living Earth. But, as Sunita Puri, a palliative-care physician and author, wrote in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, we must learn to look at grief. We cannot turn away from death and the lessons death teaches us about living. Biographers especially cannot turn away from death. It is our work for those of us who write about past lives to revive, to immortalize, and even as we do so, to write the deaths of our subjects with compassion, accuracy, and grace.”

Marshall then shared a personal and poignant story of the last time she attended a BIO Conference, in May 2019. She spoke of leaving her partner, Scott Harney, at their home in Massachusetts, while she traveled by train to New York. Harney, who was experiencing the “end stage of cardiac disease, the result of chemo treatments a decade before,” had encouraged Marshall to take the trip, where she was serving as a moderator for a panel discussion of young biographers, and where she would present that year’s Plutarch Award, as she had been serving as the committee’s chair. Marshall said, “Some of you already know that I returned home to Massachusetts to find Scott had died in his sleep at about the same time I handed David Blight his award in the [CUNY] Grad Center’s auditorium.”

This massive loss changed the course of Marshall’s own life. Rather than spend a planned sabbatical year working on a new biography, she instead compiled a volume of Harney’s poetry and published it in May 2020. Marshall explained, “By then the pandemic had taken hold. I found myself writing essays, most of them elegiac in tone. When I received the surprising and wonderful news of the BIO Award in February, I was at work on an essay I called, ‘After the First Death, There Were 19 Others,’ an effort to commemorate my friends, family members, and colleagues whose lives were extinguished during the intervening two years, some due to COVID, but most not.”

Marshall then reflected on how the death of one of her high school classmates, Jonathan “John” Jackson, a Black youth who died while leading a failed armed invasion of a California courthouse while trying to win his brother’s freedom, planted the seeds of her becoming a biographer, a professional witness of life and death, and the repercussions of both. While the administration of Marshall’s high school tried to quash all references to Jackson and his death from the graduation ceremony that year, Marshall insisted on memorializing him in her salutatorian’s address. About the experience, she said, “I’m not saying my own act was heroic. It was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But the sense of there being a grand scheme of things of which I was a tiny part, as a witness who might testify, changed me.”

Following the examples of her personal experiences of death, Marshall took her audience through a master class of the ways biographers have treated the deaths of their subjects, touching upon examples that included Carol Bundy’s The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell Jr., 1835–64 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and Dykstra’s aforementioned Clover Adams. She also made in-depth comparisons of the ways different biographers have handled the deaths of the same subjects, focusing on accounts of Elizabeth Bishop’s death in Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It by Brett C. Millier (University of California Press, 1992) and Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). Marshall also spoke about her own approach to Bishop’s death scene for her 2014 biography, and made it clear that each biographer’s account hinged greatly on the sources, conventions, and even the societal norms present [at the time of writing]. Marshall also provided three examples of death scenes from biographies of Henry David Thoreau, and thoughts about how she herself would handle writing such a passage.

Marshall quoted an anonymous friend, who she said mostly read novels and once told her she did not like reading biographies because she knew how they were going to end. But Marshall contends that life “has its own mysteries” and pursuing the art and craft of biography prepared her “for the mysteries in my own life, such as the night I returned home to find my beloved Scott curled up in bed, no longer breathing.” She recalled wondering what his final hours had been like, and she spoke of how two days before his death she had texted him while on the train to New York that she would like a copy of a particular biography for her upcoming birthday. When she discovered Harney, “the book was on the bureau beside him,” she said.

In conclusion, Marshall explained, “Until I received the BIO Award, I had thought I might never come back to a BIO Conference; the experience in 2019 was too much. But in writing this speech, confronting in yet another way that death, I’m reminded that I’d been there in 2019 because Scott wanted me to go, he wanted me to continue my work despite his illness. And so, to honor his choice back then, I promise you that I will attend every future BIO Conference I can. I hope to see all of you there in 2023 and beyond.”

The panel “How is Biography Addressing Nature and Climate Change?” took place on Saturday, May 14. It was moderated by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, a BIO Board member and author most recently of Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend (Amistad, 2008). The panelists were Andrea Barnet, author of Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters Changed Our World (Ecco, 2018); Miriam Horn, author most recently of Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), who is currently at work for Penguin Press on the first-ever biography of George Schaller; and Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Cornell University Press, 2003), and Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

The panel began with Gerzina inviting each speaker to describe what brought them to write biographies of subjects involved in the natural and scientific worlds. Andrea Barnet led off by explaining that the idea for Visionary Women came out of her realization that “there were four truly great women, each of whom, in interestingly similar and adjacent ways, had changed the way we think about the world”—Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, Jane Goodall, Jane Jacobs, and Alice Waters. Barnet then said, “All four of them were un-credentialed outsiders: green thinkers who embarked on idealistic eco missions before ‘eco’ or ‘green’ was really part of our collective vocabulary. None was an academic theorist, in fact, two—Jane Jacobs and Jane Goodall—didn’t even have college degrees, which interested me. They were people who waded into their respective fields and got their hands literally and figuratively dirty. All spoke truth to power—which was, at that time, male power. And, against all odds, prevailed.”

Miriam Horn, who spent two decades working for the U.S. Forest Service and Environmental Defense Fund and is also a prolific writer and filmmaker, was drawn to write the biography of George Schaller because of his seminal status in the field of conservation to those inside it, and his relatively low profile outside it. She said, “For anyone who has worked in wildlife, he is, without dispute, the most important field biologist of the last half century. He did the first field study of gorillas in the Congo in 1959, the work that Dian Fossey picked up a decade later. He actually went and tutored Jane Goodall, when she first got set up in the Gombe, on how to study chimps. And then he did the first field study of tigers in India, lions in the Serengeti, snow leopards in Pakistan, jaguars in Brazil, pandas in China. By the 1980s he had won the trust of the Chinese, who had just come out of the cultural revolution, because he had spent five years living in these cold, wet, bamboo jungles with pandas. And so the Chinese gave him full run of the Tibetan plateau ever since. He’s made 65 trips to the Tibetan plateau and all together has worked in 35 countries and can claim credit for national parks around the world that add up to the size of France.” Horn also said that Schaller considered himself a biographer of the animals he studied.

Of her own arrival onto the biography scene, Laura Dassow Walls said, “I backed my way into biography. I started thinking of myself as an intellectual historian, but I realized over time that I am really trying to understand conditions that shaped my own life, but understanding it through people who somehow spoke to those conditions.” Walls also explained that, as a college student, she took up the study of biology in the hopes of becoming the Goodall or the Schaller of her native Pacific Northwest, but she faced massive discouragement from her university and shifted over to an English program. She explained, “I also felt very odd in the English department, because nature was also ridiculed [there]. It wasn’t a serious subject; nature writing was not serious writing. Annie Dillard started to break that open and, eventually, interestingly enough, my mentor became Bob Richardson, her husband. I eventually became a Thoreau scholar because I wanted to understand how language met the natural world. What was the magic that Thoreau brought to us through that fierce loyalty to understanding the nonhuman world, but also his intense devotion to making language both precise and fresh and beautiful? That became my first book, Seeing New Worlds.”

The panel confirmed that writing about figures from the natural world presents some of the same challenges as found in writing other types of biographies. Barnet said, “Like all books, they become other than what you begin with.” She elaborated, “History is usually told as a series of events, but what really moves the needle [on social progress] is a change in consciousness. Each of these four women had catalyzed a really fundamental change in consciousness. So I began to look for what the common ground [is] between them, the connections—all of them were seeing the world as a web and a place of connections, and I began looking for the connections between them, between their thinking and their lives.”

Horn said that many of the challenges she faces when writing are “present tense,” because she is only halfway through her biography of Schaller. But the first and perhaps biggest obstacle, she maintained, was met long ago: “The first great challenge with George was getting him to say yes. He had been approached by many biographers and he had said no to all of them for two reasons: He recognized that [in] a lot of the countries he worked in he was often more effective if he was less visible . . . [and] he’s also just averse to attention and the limelight. He is famously taciturn. He is the ‘G. S.’ who led Peter Matthiessen into Nepal in search of the snow leopard. And Matthiessen described him as difficult to know. Fortunately, there is an incredible trove of primary sources on him. He kept hundreds of field journals. I know every chapati he ate over a decade in South Asia, but also, he was much more willing to be introspective in his journals.”

A challenge that Horn is grappling with, as she works on her biography of Schaller, is how to integrate just the right amount of the larger histories that shaped his life and times. Horn’s editor has encouraged her to make sure the story of Schaller himself stays on every page. Because Horn has science training, she said, “writing the science is actually less challenging for me than writing some of the deep history. For instance, you know, wildlife conservation got its start in a very colonial mindset and with very close affinities with eugenics . . . [and] if I am going to tell that history, I have to tell it so economically” to ensure that the subject’s life story is not lost in the pages.

While nature writing and biography are two separate genres, Walls said she “never thought of them as apart.” Because, explains Walls, in many of her subjects she has found people who “deeply embodied, sensually engaged in a nonhuman world, but connect[ed] with it deeply, spiritually, aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally, through perception and language, and thinking of language as something that doesn’t separate us from that world, but joins.” She said her subjects did not see themselves as apart from nature, but rather they recognized their lives took shape in nature.

There are very particular challenges when writing about subjects from the natural world. Barnet said some readers reflexively avoid reading about nature, and figures from nature, because they feel such a sense of despair, coupled with political impotence, regarding the state of the natural world today. Horn also explained that another barrier for readers is when writing about nature is done poorly. She said it’s possible for nature writing to get too “purple,” and when people write in too exalted a way about nature, it can come across as “very self-involved.”

But each of the writers on the panel have found ways to invite readers into their works. Barnet said, “The way we remember ideas is if we attach them to stories” through good storytelling techniques. When picking the literary voice for her group biography of four women, Barnet said she “tried to internalize . . . as much as I could of journals, diaries, letters, and opinions, and then I tried to sort of embody the voice of that character who was moving through the world and making very careful observations about the world. . . . I try to get as close as I can, even to the point where there were times where I’d have to pull back and say, you can’t know she felt that, you have to say ‘she might have felt.’”

Walls also concurred that the format of biography enables readers to engage with complex ideas differently, and for writers of biography to approach concepts from different angles. She said, “Biography is a terrific frame for intellectual history, to explore ideas. . . .was freed in a way from the intellectual kind of academic voice and I just loved writing it.”

Barnet spoke of Jane Jacobs’s work as a writer focused on urban renewal, and how Jacobs found, for example, that the denizens rushing through Grand Central Station never run into each other, exhibiting a sort of hive mentality. “I think if people were more aware that these ideas of ecology are everywhere in their lives, and this whole web-way of thinking, of systems thinking, is really fundamental to our survival as a species in every habitat, not just the natural world . . . those fundamental principles run through all of the thinking that’s moved the needle forward.”

Horn added, “One thing that all our subjects have in common is a belief in direct experience as a way of knowing, and [for] a scientist and a writer, it’s the exact same strengths that make them stand apart: focused attention, dedicated attention, and then the ability to faithfully render what it is they’re seeing.”

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

My current project is titled It’s No Wonder: The Life and Music of Motown’s Sylvia Moy. I am completing my full draft and, in the meantime, chasing down Stevie Wonder [for whom she wrote songs].

What person would you most like to write about?

I’d most like to write about someone whose legacy has been ignored or diminished, because someone else has taken credit for that person’s accomplishment(s). History has not always been documented correctly or accurately when it comes to certain people due to race, gender, or both.

Who is your favorite biographer or what is your favorite biography?

My favorite biography is The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. The truth is often staring us in the face yet too often people choose to change or ignore the narrative. Annette Gordon-Reed was unapologetic in advancing scholarship by examining and acknowledging Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings and “their” children. That part of history demonstrated inclusion and needed to be told. People lie but DNA does not.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

My most satisfying moments as a biographer have been raising awareness and speaking on behalf of those who are no longer with us. Writing for Oxford University Press’ American National Biography allows me to assist in making certain that history is inclusive, complete, and accurate. I also enjoy merging scholarly research with popular culture.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

My most frustrating moments have been not seeing myself represented. Too often there aren’t enough African American biographers and biographies that occupy these spaces.

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

If I weren’t a biographer, I would be an educator because I enjoy learning and teaching others. I view writing as a “calling” and as a ministry, because it feeds the soul and nourishes the audience. The biographer, who serves a special purpose and mission, is sometimes called upon by those still alive, and at other times by those who have transitioned. Biographers stand in the gap for those who left footprints in the sand. So, essentially, I am living my dream.

Margena A . Christian, Ed.D., is a senior lecturer, English, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The media scholar writes for Oxford University Press’ American National Biography, and she is a former Senior Editor/Senior Writer for EBONY magazine and a former Features Editor for JET magazine. Dr. Christian is the author of Empire: The House That John H. Johnson Built, a biography centered around her doctoral research and former boss, pioneering publishing magnate John H. Johnson. 

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

My first biography, America’s Forgotten Suffragists: Virginia and Francis Minor, is currently in copy editing and will be published by Globe Pequot/Two Dot Press on March 1, 2023. Virginia was very important in the suffrage movement in St. Louis from the 1860s until her death in the 1890s. Her husband, Francis, was a strong male ally and used his position as a lawyer to help Virginia take the issue of women’s suffrage to the Supreme Court in 1875—the only time that ever happened. Both Minors were close friends with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and gained a fair amount of notoriety in their time, but have since been forgotten. This is the first biography ever written about them.

What person would you most like to write about?

I have several subjects in mind, but one I’m willing to talk about is Marie Rose Ferron, a Catholic mystic and the first stigmatist in the United States. (For non-Catholics, stigmata is when someone mystically receives the wounds of Christ in their body and suffers the crucifixion in union with Jesus.) Supernatural phenomenon like this is very controversial, but I feel like she should be declared a saint. Even if you take the stigmata and visions away, she was a woman of great virtue.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

The moment I finally tracked down exactly where in St. Louis the Minors’ estate, Minoria, was located. It no longer exists, but using deeds, surveyor’s reports, and old maps, I was able to find the exact lot number and location and translate that to a modern address. There previously had been speculation about where it was located, but no one else had definitively identified it. While that is a small thing, it was very important in understanding their lives during the time they lived there. Unfortunately, today, that address is in a very bad neighborhood, so it isn’t safe to do more than drive by the empty lot.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

The Minors left precious few personal letters and no journals or other personal writings. We do have some public speeches, but those don’t give the insight that more intimate correspondence would have. It was very frustrating to not have these types of sources when I was trying to reconstruct their personalities and relationships.

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

Well, I write historical fiction and history as well, and my day job is in marketing. If I could have another job, it would be as an historian who researches and publishes rather than teaches. But if you want something totally unrelated, I’d love to be a makeup artist. Makeup is a hobby for me (I seriously have more than 40 shades of eyeshadow), and I find it a great creative outlet. I’m not nearly as good as people you see on shows like Glow Up, but it is so much fun to play with.

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure and who are some of your favorite writers?

Historical fiction and fantasy are my two favorites, but I also like gothic [fiction] and a good domestic suspense. Favorite historical fiction writers include Kate Quinn, M. J. Rose, and Susanna Kearsley. Favorite fantasy authors are Kim Harrison, Erin Morgenstern, and Seanan McGuire. Gothic: Ruth Ware, Diane Setterfield, and Carol Goodman. Domestic suspense: Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (they are co-authors), Liane Moriarty, and Kerry Lonsdale.

Nicole Evelina is a USA Today bestselling author and biographer who writes historical fiction, nonfiction, and women’s fiction. Her six books have won more than 40 awards, including four Book of the Year designations. Nicole was named Missouri’s Top Independent Author by Library Journal and Biblioboard as the winner of the Missouri Indie Author Project in 2018 and has been awarded the North Street Book Prize and the Sarton Women’s Book Award. One of her novels, Madame Presidentess, was previously optioned for film.

Editor’s Note: The “Must You Like Your Subject?” panel took place on Saturday afternoon during this year’s BIO Conference. Brian Jay Jones, author of Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination (Dutton, 2019), Washington Irving (Arcade, 2008), Jim Henson: The Biography (Ballantine, 2013), and George Lucas: A Life (Little, Brown, 2016), served as moderator. The panelists were Allen C. Guelzo, author of Robert E. Lee: A Life (Knopf, 2021); Mary Jordan, author of The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump (Simon & Schuster, 2020); and Larry Tye, author of Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy (Mariner Books, 2020). BIO member John Grady has provided this recap.

When a biographical subject is a caricatured demagogue of the 1950s, like Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, or as enigmatic as former First Lady Melania Trump, the biographer’s task is to approach the work like a journalist. As Mary Jordan said, “You have to have an open mind and want to be fair.”

Larry Tye said, when researching Joseph McCarthy, he was struck by a comment made by Ethel Kennedy, wife of New York senator Robert Kennedy, who became a liberal icon of the late 1960s. Of McCarthy, whom she and her husband had known for years, she said, “For Bobby and me, he was just plain good fun.” It was an insight Tye hadn’t expected to be said about McCarthy. As a young lawyer, Robert Kennedy had worked for McCarthy as an assistant counsel, when the senator chaired the Government Operations panel. Tye also discovered that “Tail Gunner Joe,” as McCarthy’s critics mockingly dubbed him, was in fact a war hero and “had told the truth” about his military service. He “had redeemable qualities,” said Tye, that needed to be included in a biography.

Likewise, Mary Jordan said of Melania Trump (and other subjects of biography), “People are more complicated. I have never yet found anybody that’s one of anything,” meaning no person is a monolith.

Jordan, writing under a deadline to produce The Art of Her Deal on Melania Trump’s life, went to fashion capitals like Paris and Milan, as well as to Melania’s hometown in Slovenia, as part of the research. Knowing that Melania Trump came to the United States at 26, as an already established model, Jordan realized there was a personal history of Melania that needed exploration. Jordan interviewed photographers, designers, and various other figures in the fashion and entertainment industries for her unauthorized biography. Among the things she learned was that Melania Trump had won a major contest seven years before immigrating to the United States; the prize included a movie role that was being shot in Rome. But the producer insisted that to appear in the film, Melania must have sexual relations with him. With her mother by her side, she refused him and left Rome, never appearing in the film. The reaction to this fact, by those who despised the Trumps, was: “that can’t be true,” said Jordan. “This was just research,” added Jordan, which some refused to accept because of their preconceived view of Melania Trump.

In writing Robert E. Lee: A Life, Allen Guelzo faced a different challenge. Until the late 1970s, Lee was often the subject of books that were more hagiography than serious appraisals of the man in his times. (Guelzo cited Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume R. E. Lee, the first volume of which appeared in 1934, as an exception.)

The first major change in analyzing the Confederate general, said Guelzo, came with the publication of Thomas Connelly’s Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image, in 1977. “I was building on questions that had been raised over the last 25 to 30 years and maybe even a little more,” he explained. When asking himself “How do you write the biography of someone who committed treason?” Guelzo said, “I’m interested in understanding as much as possible, over the span of a very long time, on the basis of fragmentary evidence, what this person did, why they did it, and why it’s important.” Guelzo made it clear that, in many instances, he did not believe biographers could rightfully claim omniscience or a definitive understanding of a person’s character or motives. He explained, “What we’re more often in the position of being is archaeologists. We’re trying to put together the shards of some long-lost amphora. We’re trying to make them look like the real thing. The problem is there [are] no guarantees that we’re getting the relationships right. Sometimes the most important things in someone’s life are exactly what you can’t get your hands on: love, grief. These are not elements that people express easily.”

With Robert Kennedy as his subject, Tye (who admitted he was an admirer of the senator) said he wanted to see how Kennedy morphed from a Cold War warrior working for McCarthy into a towering figure, even today, in liberal and progressive politics. By Tye’s estimation, he conducted between 400 and 450 interviews to follow the evolving political figure.

But the work, continued Tye, also needed to address questions of Kennedy’s personal life, especially allegations of womanizing. It was Ethel Kennedy who opened the door to let others discuss this aspect of her husband’s life. She told Tye she knew about the affairs but, she said, “at the end of the night he came home to me and he was a great husband and a good father” to their children. She gave Tye permission to say in the book that “Ethel forgave him.”

Whether a biographer goes into a project liking or disliking a subject is not the point when researching and writing on a particular person. Guelzo said a biographer has to avoid being dragged into a “Stockholm syndrome” when it comes to the writing. The biographer is not to assume “the role of advocate or the role of condemner in chief,” he said. As a biographer, “you have to keep your subject just a little bit at a bit of arm’s length.”