Five BIO members have new biographies out in March: 

• Burtram Collver Hopkins II, John Mills Van Osdel, Architect, and his Chicago: The Story of His Life, 1811 to 1891 (FriesenPress)
• Diane Kiesel, When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law (University of Michigan Press)
• Richard Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe: A Life (University of Virginia Press)
• Vanda Krefft, Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women (Algonquin Books)
• Joanne B. Mulcahy, Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait―A Biography (University of Alabama Press)

The latest episodes of the BIO Podcast are as follows:

• February 28:  Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), interviewed by Tamara Payne.
• March 7: Jared Stearns, author of Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress), interviewed by Simon Read.
• March 14: Ray Anthony Shepard, founding BIO Board member and author of A Long Time Coming: A Lyrical Biography of Race in America From Ona Judge to Barack Obama (Calkins Creek), interviewed by Jennifer Skoog.

Gabriella Kelly-Davies was awarded a doctor of philosophy by the University of Sydney last month. Kelly-Davies’s practice-led doctorate included a rewritten version of her biography, Breaking Through the Pain Barrier: The Extraordinary Life of Dr Michel J. Cousins (Hawkeye Publishing Pty Ltd, 2021), based on new evidence inaccessible when archives and international borders were closed during COVID-19 lockdowns. Her dissertation, “Choices, Choices, Choices: One Biographer’s Experience,” explored many of her choices while researching, writing, and publishing her biography and updating it based on fresh archival evidence.

Patti Marxsen, author of Jacques Roumain: A Life of Resistance (Caribbean Studies Press, 2019) and winner of the 2019 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize, has released a complete translation of Roumain’s poetry. Published in a dual-language French-English edition by Educa Vision Inc., it marks the first time all of Roumain’s poems are available to Anglophone readers.

Lisa Napoli will be a panelist at CUNY Graduate Center’s free conference “Disability & Life Writing” on April 4. The one-day conference “will address individual lives, lived experiences, and the social experiences of disability and chronic illness through all forms of life expressions.” All are welcome. More info. 

Kathleen Spaltro’s upcoming biography, Ethel Barrymore: Shy Empress of the Footlights, will be published by University Press of Kentucky in January 2026. Spaltro previously wrote about another member of the storied acting family in Lionel Barrymore: Character and Endurance in Hollywood’s Golden Age (University Press of Kentucky, 2024).

David Veltman and Daniel R. Meister have co-edited a festschrift called Biography Across the Digitized Globe: Essays in Honour of Hans Renders (Leiden and Boston: Brill). This collection of essays pays tribute to Renders, the co-founder of The Biography Institute in the Netherlands and a founding member of BIO. According to the press release, Veltman and Meister “asked 13 biographers from around the world to reflect on the dual challenges of the proliferation of digitized sources and increasingly international, transnational, and cosmopolitan lives.” BIO members Nigel Hamilton, Craig Howes, and Veltman are among the biographers who contributed essays.

Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life by Mary Helen Washington will be published by Yale University Press in February 2026.