BIO Welcomes Four New Board Members

This spring, BIO welcomed four new board members for the 2021-2023 term. You can learn a bit about them here.

Heather Clark is the author of three award-winning books on twentieth-century poets, most recently, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf, 2020), which was a biography finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize, and won the Biographers’ Club Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, England. She lives outside of New York City, where she is working on her next book about mid-century-women poets in Boston.

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is the author or editor of nine books, including Carrington: A Life, Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden, Black London: Life Before Emancipation, and Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and Into Legend. She has appeared many times on British and American radio and television, and on podcasts. For 15 years, she hosted the nationally syndicated radio show “The Book Show.” Three years ago she presented the 10-part BBC radio series “Britain’s Black Past,” on which her latest book is based. She has been a tenured professor at Vassar, Barnard, Dartmouth, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Fulbright. She is currently the Paul Kendall Murray Professor of Biography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the American Antiquarian Society.

Anne C. Heller is a magazine editor and journalist and the author of Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times and Ayn Rand and the World She Made. She is a former managing editor of The Antioch Review, fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook, and executive editor of the magazine development group at Condé Nast Publications. She has been a visiting professor of literature at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the New York University Biographers Seminar.

Holly Van Leuven is the author of Ray Bolger: More than a Scarecrow (Oxford University Press, 2019), for which she won the inaugural BIO/Hazel Rowley Prize. She began her career as a scholarly publisher at first the MIT Press and then the Harvard Education Press, and has since been involved in a variety of media-related startups. She currently works as an editor for various nonfiction outlets, including The Biographer’s Craft.