Two BIO members have new biographies out this month:

• Marcia Biederman, The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill: Abortion, Death, and Concealment in Victorian New England (Chicago Review Press)
• Jeffrey D. Simon, The Bulldog Detective: William J. Flynn and America’s First War Against the Mafia, Spies, and Terrorists (Prometheus)

John M. Harris Jr.’s Pestilence, Insanity, and Trees: How Stephen Smith Changed New York came out last month from Routledge.

And the paperback edition of Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, a biography of Ellen and William Craft, is available this month from Simon & Schuster.

Patrick Parr got a book deal with the University of Massachusetts Press for his next biography, Malcolm Before X.

The January episodes of the BIO Podcast are as follows:

• January 5, Walter Isaacson, author most recently of Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster, 2023), gave a lecture titled “Lessons About Living with Genius” at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
• January 12, Yunte Huang, author of Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History (Liveright, 2023), interviewed by Jennifer Skoog.
• January 19, Brad Snyder, author of Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), interviewed by Jennifer Skoog.
• January 26, Dean King, author of Guardians Of The Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite (Scribner, 2023), interviewed by Brian Jay Jones.

Additionally:

Kai Bird recently sat for an interview conducted by The Debs Center at the American University of Beirut to discuss the university’s role as a center for free thought in the Middle East, as well as the role of biography in sharing history with a wide audience. Watch the clip here.

Nicholas Boggs was awarded a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. He is at work on James Baldwin: A Love Story, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Learn more here.

Jonathan Eig was interviewed by Salon about the real meaning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Read the article here.

Roy Foster gave the inaugural WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture in London, on December 14. The event concluded a year of celebrations for the WB Yeats Nobel Prize Centenary. Learn more here.

Nigel Hamilton will be the featured speaker at the Abraham Lincoln Association (ALA) Birthday Banquet, on February 17. Hamilton is at work on a dual biography of Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Tickets to the Birthday Symposium & Banquet and other Abraham Lincoln Association events are available here.

Arthur Hoyle reviewed David Mamet’s Everywhere An Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood (Simon & Schuster, 2023) for the New York Journal of Books. Read the review here.