Podcast Episode #53 – David Nasaw

November 13th, 2020

This week we feature an archived “live” presentation from the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Leon Levy Center for Biography. On September 25, 2019, historian David Nasaw, an award-winning author of biographies about Joseph P. Kennedy, William Randolph Hearst, and Andrew Carnegie, delivered the Levy Center’s 12th Annual Lecture. Nasaw’s engaging presentation was titled My Three Moguls. 

Podcast Episode #51 – Hermione Lee

October 30th, 2020

This week we feature an archival interview from the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Leon Levy Center for Biography. Hermione Lee, distinguished British biographer, former president of Oxford University’s Wolfson College, and winner of the 2020 BIO Award, was interviewed by fellow award-winning author Gary Giddins. Lee’s books include biographies of writers Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf. This interview was recorded in front of a Levy Center audience on March 25, 2013.

Podcast Episode #50 – David Blight

October 23rd, 2020

This week we feature an archival interview from the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Leon Levy Center for Biography. Distinguished author and Yale University professor David Blight was interviewed by author and CUNY history professor James Oakes. Blight’s Pultizer Prize-winning book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2018. This interview was recorded in front of a Levy Center audience on April 15, 2019. 

Podcast Episode #49 – Bridgett M. Davis

October 16th, 2020

In this week’s episode, we feature an archival interview from the City University of New York’s Leon Levy Center for Biography. Author Bridgett M. Davis was interviewed by author and Columbia University professor Farah Jasmine Griffin about Davis’s book, The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers. This interview was recorded in front of a live Levy Center audience on February 15, 2019. 

Bridget M. Davis; photo by Nina Subin

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Ileene Smith Receives 2019 Editorial Excellence Award

November 18th, 2019

Ileene Smith, winner of BIO’s 2019 Editorial Excellence Award, received her award on November 13 at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Smith has been vice president and executive editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux since 2012. She is also editorial director of the Jewish Lives series published by Yale University Press and the Leon D. Black Foundation. Smith has previously been the recipient of the PEN/Roger Klein Award, the Tony Godwin Memorial Award, and a Jerusalem Fellowship.

Below is a video of the evening’s events.

The video is courtesy of the Leon Levy Center.

Levy Center for Biography Seeks Executive Director

August 5th, 2016

The Leon Levy Center for Biography, part of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), is seeking an executive director who will also have the title of distinguished lecturer. In announcing the job opening, CUNY said the preferred candidate “will be a renowned biographer who can serve as an articulate spokesperson for the Leon Levy Center for Biography and for the genre of biography and can solidify The Graduate Center’s reputation as the pre-eminent institution devoted to the study and promotion of biography. The director will be a practitioner who has thoughtfully considered issues in biographical writing and the place of biography in the academy and in contemporary literary culture.” The search committee for the position, led by David Nasaw, will begin reviewing resumes on August 10 and plans to conduct interview during September. For more information and to apply, go here.