Several BIO members have new books out this month:

• Patti Bender, Happy Landings: Emilie Loring’s Life, Writing, and Wisdom (City Point Press)
• Mark Borthwick, A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright (University of Wisconsin Press)
• Candice Shy Hooper, Delivered Under Fire: Absalom Markland and Freedom’s Mail (Potomac Books)
• Diana P. Parsell, Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees (Oxford University Press)
• Susan Ronald, Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923–1941 (St. Martin’s Press)

Two BIO members have paperback editions of their books coming out this month:

• Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House Trade Paperbacks)
• Jeffrey Frank, The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945–1953 (Simon & Schuster)

And a paperback edition of an anthology BIO member Megan Marshall contributed to is now out: Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau, edited by Andrew Blauner (Princeton University Press).

Margena A. Christian has secured a book deal; her project, It’s No Wonder: The Life and Music of Motown’s Sylvia Moy, has been sold to Hachette Books by Joseph Perry at Perry Literary.

The following is a list of the February episodes of BIO Podcast:

• March 3: Neil Baldwin, author of Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern (Knopf, 2022), interviewed by Jennifer Skoog.
• March 10: Diana P. Parsell, author of Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees (Oxford University Press, 2023), interviewed by Lisa Napoli.
• March 17: Hilary A. Hallett, author of The Hollywood It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood (Liveright, 2022), interviewed by Jennifer Skoog.
• March 24: Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos, author of The Pirate’s Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd (HarperCollins, 2022), interviewed by Lisa Napoli.
• March 31: Lydia Moland, author of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2022), interviewed by Jennifer Skoog.

Additionally:

Debby Applegate and Abbott Kahler held an event at the New York Public Library, on March 9, about “ladies of the evening.” 

Neil Baldwin will hold an event at the Toronto Public Library about his book Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern (Knopf, 2022), on Monday, April 17, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. (Eastern). More information is available here.

Kai Bird spoke about Jimmy Carter and his biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (Crown, 2021), on the Bloomberg Balance of Power podcast.

Lois Banner has both an update and a request for fellow BIO members: “My definitive biography of Greta Garbo—Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo—will be published by Rutgers University Press in November 2023. I learned to read German and Swedish to do it. I was very surprised to find how similar to Marilyn Monroe she was, having published a definitive biography of Marilyn. Garbo played the ultimate trick of passing herself off as very feminine, but she really thought of herself as a homosexual male. I think she was a fabulous actress, but she didn’t like any of her MGM films. I am certain that the Sewing Circle existed in Hollywood, but I haven’t been able to find much about it. If any BIO members have found out anything about it, I’d really like to hear from them.” (You can email Banner here.)

Robert Caro was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air podcast by Dave Davies about LBJ and the presidency.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle wrote an informative Twitter thread about her biographical subject, Sonora Babb, in response to Babb recently going viral on social media, as more users discovered that John Steinbeck relied heavily on Babb’s work.

Beverly Gage received a 2023 Bancroft Prize from the trustees of Columbia University for her biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2022).

James McGrath Morris will serve on a panel at the Arizona History Convention in Tempe, AZ, on April 15. More information is available here.

Eugene Meyer reviewed Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer (Bloomsbury, 2023) for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Hank Nuwer has published a number of memoirs for the Limberlost Review of Boise, Idaho. He has moved from his editing job in the Midwest to his managing editor position in the South at the Fairbanks (AK) Daily News-Miner.

Diana P. Parsell has speaking events lined up in conjunction with the March 1 launch of her book Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees (Oxford University Press). She started off with a virtual talk on February 27, sponsored by The George Washington University Museum’s “D.C. Mondays” series (recording here), and will give another talk at D.C.’s Politics & Prose bookstore on March 27. Information about that event is available here. As part of National Cherry Blossom Festival activities, Diana will appear at the University Club, on March 23, with Patricia Taft, the great-granddaughter of First Lady Helen Taft, in a discussion about the historic partnership between Helen Taft and Eliza Scidmore that led to the planting of the city’s first cherry trees from Japan, in 1912. Information about that event is available here. Diana was the 2017 winner of BIO’s Hazel Rowley Prize.

Board member Steve Paul was highlighted in January by the Missouri Arts Council as a featured artist, focusing largely on his biographies of Ernest Hemingway and Evan S. Connell. He is also scheduled to read this month, from his Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell (University of Missouri Press, 2021), at Central Missouri University. And currently, he is serving as a judge for the Society of Midland Authors’ Bernard J. Brommel Award For Biography & Memoir of 2022.

Betsy Prioleau’s biography of Mrs. Frank Leslie, Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age (Abrams, March 2022) will be released in paperback, December 19, 2023. It was a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” and a Wall Street Journal “Noteworthy Book.”

Raquel Ramsey presented a lecture on her book, Taking Flight: The Nadine Ramsey Story (University Press of Kansas, 2020), at the Pasadena Public Library. A recording of the event is available here.

Carl Rollyson was interviewed by Literary Hub about William Faulkner.