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.
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.
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Theresa Kaminski just released Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights.
BIO invited the 10 authors who had already signed up to read at the 2020 conference to record themselves reading three-minute excerpts from their books. As it happens, all 10 books are about women, both little-known and well-known. In order of presentation, the readers are Jerry Mikorenda, John Holliday, Kimberley Hamlin, Sunny Salter-Pace, Patricia Laurence, Marcia Biederman, Cathy Curtis, Carol Sklenicka, Bernice Lerner, and Carl Rollyson.
