Two BIO members have recently closed book deals:

• Pat Hoerth sold Evelyn Beatrice Longman: The Woman who Sculpted Thomas Edison, Golden Boy, and Other Monuments to Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.
• Melissa Nathanson sold Another World Out There: The Life of Harry Blackmun (author of Roe v. Wade) to University of Minnesota Press. The agent was Henry Thayer at Brandt & Hochman.

The June episodes of the BIO Podcast are as follows:

• June 7, Marsha Gordon, author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (University of California Press, 2023), interviewed by Debby Applegate.
• June 14, Brad Gooch, author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (Harper, 2024), interviewed by Jennifer Skoog.
• June 21, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, author of The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), interviewed by Jennifer Skoog.
• June 28, Will Hermes, author of Lou Reed: The King of New York (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), interviewed by Laurie Gwen Shapiro.

Diana P. Parsell was named a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors’ 2024 Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir with her book Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Additionally:

Lois Banner wished to share the following update with BIO members: “Now that my new book on Greta Garbo is out, I am writing a book with my husband, John Laslett, an emeritus professor of history at UCLA, who has written many books on the history of labor, radicalism, and immigration. The book is titled Pondicherry Eyes: Little Holland House, the Seven Pattle Sisters, and the Glamour and Tragedy of Empire. It is a group biography. John is English by birth and identity, and although I am American by birth, we both have spent a lot of time in Europe. I’m going to need help from specialists in British history in particular on this book.”

Sallie Bingham published a historical fiction novel with Turtle Point Press, Taken by the Shawnee. She said of the book, “Taken by the Shawnee is actually the biography of my many times grandmother, Margaret Erskine, who was picked up by a party of Shawnee when she was on her way with others from Virginia to Kentucky. Hers is a different kind of captivity story. During her four years with the Shawnee in their various camps on the Ohio, they were being pursued by Colonial soldiers who soon drove them out of their country. In 1789, she was adopted as the chief’s daughter and suffered no abuse, valued for being able to teach reading and writing and for sewing men’s shirts. It is based on Margaret’s account and extensive research.” Learn more about the book here.

Mary Chapman is a 2024 Visiting Scholar at Oxford University’s Centre for Life Writing. As the 2024 Northrop Frye Centre Lecturer, she delivered the address: “Reparative Archival Work: Sharing the Stories of Chinese North America’s First Families,” at the University of Toronto. Recently, she also shared her research on Asian American writer Sui Sin Far ([pen name for] Edith Eaton) and her family, with the Women Writing Women’s Lives group, in May of this year. You can watch her Frye lecture here.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle was elected to the board of the National Book Critics. She is the co-vice president of Awards. Learn about the board here.

Carl Rollyson published an essay in Modern Age titled “Rise and Fall of the Gentleman Hero,” detailing how “Ronald Colman’s chivalrous leading men gave way to James Dean’s rebels without a cause.” Read it here.