Three BIO members have new books out this month:

• Danell Jones, The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race and the Dreadnought Hoax (Hurst)
• Patricia Meisol, A Heart Afire: Helen Brooke Taussig’s Battle Against Heart Defects, Unsafe Drugs, and Injustice in Medicine (The MIT Press)
• Judith Tick, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song (W. W. Norton & Company)

Two BIO members have new paperback editions out:

• Betsy Prioleau, Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in New York City’s Gilded Age (Abrams Press)
• Christine Wolf, Politics, Partnerships, & Power: The Lives of Ralph E. and Marguerite Stitt Church (Master Wings Publishing)

Additionally, two BIO members have new book deals. Patricia A. Billingsley sold her project, Lorca in Eden: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover (a biography of Federico Garcia Lorca), to the University of New Mexico Press. The agent was Roseanne Wells at Lucinda Literary. And, David Greenberg sold his untitled biography of John Lewis to Simon & Schuster. Peter Matson at Sterling Lord Literistic was the agent.

The December episodes of the BIO Podcast are as follows:

• December 1, Rachel L. Swarns, author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the Catholic Church (Random House, June 2023), in conversation with Eric K. Washington.
• December 8, Satvinder Juss, author of Bhagat Singh: A Life in Revolution (India Viking, December 2022), in conversation with Kevin McGruder.
• December 15, Beverly Gage, author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, November 2022), in conversation with Jennifer Skoog.
• December 22, Maryemma Graham, author of The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker (Oxford University Press, December 2022), interviewed by Kevin McGruder.
• December 29, Justin Martin, author of A Fierce Glory: Antietam, the Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery (Da Capo Press, September 2018), interviewed by Sonja Williams.

Stephanie Genty and Matthew Zipf are on the shortlist for the 2023 Tony Lothian Prize for the best uncommissioned proposal by a first-time biographer.

Additionally:

Neil Baldwin’s biography, Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern (Knopf, October 2022), was featured in Pittsburgh magazine as part of the “Pittsburgh Lit: What We’re Reading this December” feature. You can view it here.

Jonathan Eig held an event on December 4, at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York City, regarding his biography of Martin Luther King Jr., King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2023). He was interviewed by Randall Kennedy. A recording of the event is available here.

Didi Hoffman published an essay, “A Life of Excellence: The Artist and Humanitarian Malvina Hoffman (1885–1966),” in the new book Discovering Women Sculptors (PSSA Publishing, 2023), an anthology of the most important women sculptors from the 17th to late 20th century. The collection is available here.

Bernice Lerner published the essay “What Barbie Meant to My Mother, a Holocaust Survivor” in Kveller. You can read it here.

Eugene L. Meyer reviewed Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, November 2023) for the Washington Independent Review of Books. You can read the review here.

Lisa Napoli appeared on a panel at the White House Historical Association in November focusing on “Covering the White House in Real Time.” She was also a featured author at the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Feasts and recently interviewed New York Times reporter and author Adam Nagourney about his new book, The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism (Crown, September 2023), in front of a live audience for Live Talks LA.

Peter Oltchick won the American Writing Award for Sports Book for the biography he co-wrote with Bill Bell, Football for Fun: The Story of Coach Stewart “Fergie” Ferguson (South Dakota Historical Society Press, September 2023). Learn more here.

Paula Tarnapol Whitacre wrote about Clara Barton and Harriet Jacobs for the Emerging Civil War blog. You can read the blog posts here and here.

Marlene Trestman will give a virtual book talk for the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires, on January 11, regarding her biography Most Fortunate Unfortunates: The Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans (LSU Press, October 2023). More information and registration are available here.