This week we feature Jonathan Eig, former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal and the author of a new biography of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—King: A Life (Farrar Straus and Giroux, May 2023). Eig is a New York Times bestselling author of five previous books including: Ali: A Life (Mariner Books, 2017); Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (Simon & Schuster, 2005); and Opening Day: The Story of … Read More »

This week we interview Kerri K. Greenidge, the Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. The author most recently of The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family (Liveright, November 2022), Greenidge also wrote Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019), one of The New York Times’ top picks of 2019. She is also the recipient of the… Read More »

This week we interview Celia Stahr, author of Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist (St. Martin’s Press, March 2020). This biography of celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s formative time during the early 1930s in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York, received many positive reviews in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, and Booklist. Stahr teaches art history at the University of San Francisco, where… Read More »

This week we interview Jonny Steinberg, author of Winnie and Nelson Mandela: Portrait of a Marriage, published by Knopf in May 2023. Steinberg has written several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and he is a two-time winner of South Africa’s premier nonfiction award and an inaugural winner of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize. Steinberg served as professor of African Studies at Oxford University and currently… Read More »

This week we interview Sung-Yoon Lee, author of The Sister: The Extraordinary Story of Kim Yo Jong, the Most Powerful Woman in North Korea, published in America by Public Affairs in September of this year. A fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Lee has taught Korean history at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. Sung-Yoon Lee is interviewed by BIO member Jennifer Skoog.        … Read More »

This special episode features a spirited conversation between award-winning journalist and biographer Pamela Newkirk and BIO’s 2023 Plutarch Award-winner Jennifer Homans. The Plutarch Award recognizes the best biography of the year, as determined by a BIO committee of distinguished biographers. Homans earned this honor for her latest book, Mr. B.: Balanchine’s 20th Century (Random House, November 2022). Homans is the dance critic for The New Yorker, a Scholar-in-Residence at New York University, and the founding… Read More »

This week we interview sports journalist and author Jeff Pearlman. His latest book, The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson, was published in October 2022 by Mariner Books. Pearlman has also written eight New York Times best-selling books, including Football for a Buck, The Bad Guys Won!, Boys Will Be Boys, Showtime, Sweetness, and Gunslinger. He is the host of the Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast and… Read More »

This week we interview E. James West, a historian and lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies and Cultures at England’s University College of London. He also serves as co-director of the Black Press Research Collective based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. West has authored three books, most recently Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr., published in July 2022 as a part of the African American Intellectual History series from the… Read More »

This week we present the second half of our special two-part interview with Candice Millard, author of four New York Times bestsellers. Her most recent book, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile, was published by Doubleday in May of 2022. Her previous books include The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, and Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and … Read More »

This week we present the first segment of a special two-part interview with Candice Millard, author of four New York Times bestsellers. Her most recent book, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile, was published by in May 2022 by Doubleday. Her previous books include The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, and Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and … Read More »