This week we interview Aidan Levy whose latest book, Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins, was published in December 2022 by Hachette Books. Levy also authored, Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed, and he edited Patti Smith on Patti Smith: Interviews and Encounters. A former Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellow, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, JazzTimes, and … Read More »

This week we interview Chad Williams, the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. His latest book, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War, was published in April 2023 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Williams specializes in African American and modern US History, African American military history, the World War I era and African American intellectual history. Also,… Read More »

This week we feature the second segment of a special two-part interview featuring award-winning biographer, Stacy Schiff. Her latest book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, was published by Little, Brown and Company in October 2022. Schiff is the author of several best-selling and acclaimed biographies, including gripping examinations of Cleopatra, the Witches of Salem and her Pulitzer Prize winning study of Vera Nabokov. Schiff is a Guggenheim, NEH and New York Public Library Cullman Center… Read More »

This week we feature the first segment of a special two-part interview with award-winning biographer, Stacy Schiff.  Her latest book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, was published by Little, Brown, and Company in October 2022. Schiff is the author of several best-selling biographies, including compelling examinations of Cleopatra, the Witches of Salem and her Pulitzer Prize winning study of Vera Nabokov. Schiff is a Guggenheim, NEH and New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow,… Read More »

This week we interview Ashley Brown, assistant history professor and the Allan H. Selig Chair in Sport and Society in U.S. History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her biography, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson, was published in February 2023 by Oxford University Press. Gibson was the first African American to compete and win championship titles at Wimbledon, as well at the United States, French, and Australian Opens. She was also… Read More »

This week we interview RJ Smith, author of Chuck Berry: An American Life, published in November 2022 by Hachette Books. Smith is a senior editor at Los Angeles Magazine, a contributor to Details, a columnist for The Village Voice and a staff writer for Spin. He also has written for GQ, New York Times Magazine, Elle, and Men’s Vogue. His book The One: The Life and Music of … Read More »

This special episode features excerpts from a conversation between award-winning journalist and author Andrew Meier and fellow biographer and BIO member Kai Bird. Meier’s latest book, Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty, was published in October 2022 by Random House, and it’s a comprehensive examination of one of New York’s most influential families. This live, in-person discussion was recorded on October 11, 2022, in Manhattan, and sponsored by the Leon… Read More »

This week we interview Helen Rappaport, the British author of sixteen highly regarded biographies. Her latest book, In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian, was published by Pegasus Books in September 2022. Rappaport has been a full-time historian and writer for more than twenty-three years, and in 2003 she discovered and purchased an 1869 portrait of Mary Seacole. The painting now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and… Read More »

This week we interview Andrew Nagorski, an award-winning journalist and author of Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom, published by Simon and Schuster in August 2022. Nagorski spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek, and he is the author of eight books, including Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power and The Nazi Hunters. Nagorski gained international notoriety when the Soviet government, angered… Read More »

This week we interview Lydia Moland, professor of philosophy at Colby College and author of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life, published by in the University of Chicago Press in October 2022. This biography explores the life of one of the nineteenth century’s most courageous abolitionists. Moland’s work on Lydia Maria Child has appeared in the Paris Review, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the American Scholar, and on National… Read More »