Four BIO members have new biographies out in July:

• Molly Beer, Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Kate Culkin, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press)
• Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, 90 Seconds to Midnight: A Hiroshima Survivor’s Nuclear Odyssey (Potomac Books)
• Evelyne Resnick and Petie Kladstrup, The Last Empress of France: The Rebellious Life of Eugénie de Montijo (Hanover Square Press)

The latest episodes of the BIO Podcast are as follows:

• June 20: Journalist, historian, and Vietnam War veteran Marc Leepson is the author of 11 books. His most recent book, The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton, was published by Stackpole Press in December 2024. He discusses it with John A. “Jack” Farrell. 
• June 27: Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance (Scribner, 2025) is the latest book by award-winning journalist and author A’Lelia Bundles. She chats with Eric K. Washington. 

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Program through the American Conservation Experience, Neil Baldwin, biographer of Thomas Edison, is serving as mentor to Melissa Benbow, Ph.D., who is conducting a two-year research project: “The Lives of Domestic Workers at Glenmont, Thomas and Mina Edison’s Home in West Orange, New Jersey.” 

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia will award its 37th annual Liberty Medal to the Broadway hit Hamilton, which marks its 10th anniversary this year, and Ron Chernow, whose book inspired the musical. According to the press release, “The recognition honors their singular impact in bringing the story of the U.S. Constitution to life for generations of Americans and inspiring a deeper public engagement with the principles of the founding era. As America prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding, the National Constitution Center will celebrate Hamilton and Chernow and their transformational contributions to civic education at a ceremony overlooking Independence Mall on October 17, 2025.”

Greg Daugherty interviewed fellow BIO member Danny Fingeroth and 2017 Plutarch Award-nominee Larry Tye for a History.com article on “How Superman Mobilized the WWII Home Front.” Among their other books: Fingeroth is the author of Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society (Bloomsbury Academic, 2004); Tye wrote Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero (Random House, 2012).

Gabriella Kelly-Davies recently featured several biographers in episodes of Biographers in Conversation. Professor Robert Zaretsky from the University of Houston shared his choices while crafting The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas and Kiera Lindsey spoke about her speculative biography Wild Love. Kelly-Davies also spoke with Oxford scholar Sally Bayley about her book, The Green Lady: A Spirit, A Story, A Place, an experimental blend of biography, fiction, and family history. Kelly-Davies also explored Lamisse Hamouda’s The Shape of Dust, the deeply disturbing account of her father’s wrongful arrest in Egypt and Lamisse’s desperate 443-day struggle to free him from Tora, one of Egypt’s most notorious prisons. The Shape of Dust won Australia’s 2024 National Biography Award. 

Michael Paller is the co-editor, with Anne Cattaneo and Tony Kushner, of John Guare: Plays, to be published in September by the Library of America. Paller is also writing a biography of Guare.

In October 2025, Oxford University Press will publish Steven Smith’s book Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema. This dual biography, which focuses on a specific period in the lives of its subjects, draws on Smith’s 40 years of research on the topic. He previously penned a biography of Herrmann in 1991. The new book features information from numerous new interviews and a substantial amount of previously unpublished material.