Biographers International Organization

Please join fellow BIO members on November 10 for an hour of online social networking. This will be an opportunity to meet with those who are working on similar types of biography or who are at a similar stage in the process. When you register, your Zoom confirmation email will have a link to a questionnaire that will help us to organize the breakout rooms for this event. Please complete the questionnaire as soon as… Read More »

A longtime member of the Board of Directors and current chair of the Membership Committee, best-selling biographer Kitty Kelley has made a major gift to BIO of $50,000. Kelley’s donation will fund two Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowships per year for the next five years. The winners will receive a stipend of $5,000 each.   “I feel that supporting the Rollin Fellowships helps BIO reach its immense potential as an organization that is supportive and inclusive,” Kelley… Read More »

BIO is celebrating the 100th episode of the BIO Podcast! The 100th episode features BIO member Kitty Kelley interviewing Gwendolyn Mink and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu about their biography, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (NYU Press, 2022). The BIO Podcast is managed by BIO Board member Sonja Williams. Listen to the episode here or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts Spotify, or Stitcher. The complete podcast archive is also available… Read More »

BIO is pleased to announce the first in a series of online events planned for 2022-2023: a discussion of the 2022 Plutarch Award winner, Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson. The event will take place on Saturday, September 17, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings time. Register here. Nigel Hamilton, chair of the 2022 Plutarch Award committee, will interview Frances Wilson about the way she crafted the… Read More »

Longtime BIO member and BIO Board member Kitty Kelley has donated $50,000 to the organization. The generous donation will fund two annual Rollin Fellowships of $5,000 each for the next five years. The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, given to writers of exceptional biographies in progress about African American subjects, was first awarded in 2021 to Rachel L. Swarns for a multigenerational biography of an enslaved Black family torn apart by the 1838 slave sale that… Read More »

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.… Read More »

Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has won the 2022 Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2021. Wilson, a biographer and critic, is also the author of The Courtesan’s Revenge: The Life of Harriette Wilson, the Woman Who Blackmailed the King (Faber & Faber, 2003) How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (Harper, 2011), and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas … Read More »

Interview conducted by Holly Van Leuven, editor of The Biographer’s Craft Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in the April 2022 issue of The Biographer’s Craft, the members’ publication of BIO. Megan Marshall is the distinguished biographer of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, April 2005, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize), Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2013, winner … Read More »