Biographers International Organization

By Dona Munker, TBC New York Correspondent On November 8, Robert Weil, editor-in-chief and publishing director of Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton, received BIO’s fourth annual Editorial Excellence Award. He joins Nan A. Talese, Jonathan Segal, and Robert Gottlieb, as winners of this honor. Introduced by one of his authors, Thomas Jefferson biographer Annette Gordon-Reed, Weil said that he thinks he may have become an editor because editing fulfills “a yearning to rescue… Read More »

By Dona Munker, TBC New York Correspondent  Deirdre Bair, who has written six biographies, is currently writing about her experiences while researching and writing Beckett (1978) and Simone de Beauvoir (1990). At the fall 2017 Dorothy O. Helly Work-in-Progress Lecture, presented by New York’s Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar, she talked about her reasons for doing so and the challenges for a seasoned biographer who decides to become part of the story. Bair originally planned… Read More »

Karen Adler Abramson and the staff at the John F. Kennedy Library Archives received their 2017 Biblio Award last month from BIO’s James McGrath Morris. From left to right, the honorees are Laurie Austin, Textual/Audiovisual Reference Archivist; Maryrose Grossman, Audiovisual Reference Archivist; Stacey Chandler, Textual Reference Archivist; and Karen Adler Abramson, Director of Archives. The Biblio Award is presented annually to recognize a librarian or archivist who has made an exceptional contribution to the craft… Read More »

In honor of the work of Robert and Ina Caro, Biographers International Organization has set up an annual research and travel fellowship. BIO members with a work in progress can apply to receive funding for research trips to archives or to important settings in their subject’s lives. This fellowship is a reflection of BIO’s ongoing commitment to support authors in writing beautifully contextualized and tenaciously researched biographies. The Caro Research/Travel Fellowship is restricted to support… Read More »

BIO is now accepting applications for the 2018 Hazel Rowley Prize. The aim of this prize is to help a first-time biographer of real promise in four ways: through funding (the $2,000 prize); by securing a careful reading from at least one established agent; a year’s membership in Biographers International Organization (BIO); and publicity through the BIO website and The Biographer’s Craft newsletter, among other outlets. The prize is named in memory of Hazel Rowley… Read More »

(Continued from the October 2017 issue of The Biographer’s Craft) Turning to subject matter, the Chronicle of Higher Education forum noted that most acquisitions editors are overwhelmingly white and asked participants if this affects what gets published. The answers varied widely. For his part, Kulka offered this observation about race and publishing: “The enormous success of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s books demonstrates there’s a real need and desire to read about race in this country from… Read More »

Robert Weil, editor-in-chief and publishing director of Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton, will receive BIO’s fourth annual Editorial Excellence Award on Wednesday, November 8, at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York. Weil’s celebrated publishing career began in 1978 at Times Books. He became senior editor at St. Martin’s Press in 1988; a decade later, he moved to W. W. Norton as executive editor. Named to his present positions in 2011,… Read More »

James Atlas’s The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale was published to high praise by Pantheon Books on August 22. As Ron Chernow wrote about the book, “Anyone even remotely interested in the art of biography will be captivated.” In moving and hilarious stories from his own life and his lifelong study of biographers, Atlas—an active BIO member and the celebrated biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, as well as the founding editor… Read More »