Bill Thomas Named Recipient of BIO’s 2026 Editorial Excellence Award

August 27th, 2026

Biographers International Organization (BIO) has selected Bill Thomas, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Doubleday, as the recipient of its 2026 Editorial Excellence Award. The annual award, established in 2014, honors an editor whose work has made an outstanding contribution to biography and literature.

Thomas will receive the award at a special BIO event on Tuesday, October 6, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. The event is free and open to the public, with registration required.

For more than three decades, Thomas has played a significant role in shaping the nonfiction and literary landscape at Doubleday. He joined the publisher as an editor in 1993, became Editor-in-Chief in 1998, and was named Publisher and Editor-in-Chief in 2008.

During his leadership, Doubleday has published nine Pulitzer Prize winners, three National Book Award winners, and five National Book Critics Circle Award winners. The house has also published hundreds of New York Times bestsellers and more than 125 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year.

Alongside his editorial and management responsibilities, Thomas has worked closely with a distinguished group of nonfiction authors, including Patrick Radden Keefe, Hampton Sides, Candice Millard, Scott Anderson, David Grann, Jon Krakauer, Jane Mayer, and Joe Torre. His fiction authors have included Aimee Bender, Mark Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, and Colson Whitehead.

Kathleen Stone, chair of the BIO award committee, said Thomas and the authors he has worked with have “excited the literary world with innovative subject matter, creative storytelling and deep research” in nonfiction.

His authors have similarly emphasized both his editorial judgment and his commitment to their work.

“I’ve been working with Bill Thomas for twenty years, and there is nobody like him in publishing, no keener eye, no steadier hand,” said Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain, Say Nothing, The Snakehead, and London Falling. “He has championed and helped shape so much of the great literature of this century, across fiction and nonfiction. I feel humbled and lucky to work with him.”

Biographer Hampton Sides, author of The Wide, Wide Sea, On Desperate Ground, In the Kingdom of Ice, Hellhound on His Trail, and Blood and Thunder, described Thomas as “a ferocious champion of books” and praised his ability to help authors make their work “sparkle and shine.”

Candice Millard, whose biographies include River of the Gods, Hero of the Empire, Destiny of the Republic, and The River of Doubt, has worked with Thomas on every book she has written. “He is the perfect editor, a true scholar, and a genuine friend,” she said.

The October 6 celebration will feature remarks from Scott Anderson, David Grann, Millard, Keefe, and Sides.

The Editorial Excellence Award has been presented by BIO since 2014. Previous recipients include Bob Bender, Tim Duggan, Robert Gottlieb, Gerald Howard, Michael Korda, Kate Medina, Gayatri Patnaik, Jonathan Segal, Ileene Smith, Nan A. Talese, and Robert Weil.

BIO members and the public are invited to join us in honoring Bill Thomas on October 6. The event is free, but registration is required.

Francesca Wade Wins 2026 Plutarch Award for Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

May 29th, 2026

Francesca Wade has been named the winner of the 2026 Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2025, with her book Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner). The Plutarch, the only international prize of its kind, is selected by a committee of five distinguished biographers and carries a $3,000 honorarium.

This year’s committee, chaired by Mary Dearborn, praised Wade’s book as “a compelling original approach to Stein’s life and work and, ultimately, our thinking about biography itself.” The committee noted that Wade traces key figures in the reconstruction of Stein’s legacy — from Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas to scholars like Leon Katz and Janet Malcolm — and called the work “a ground-breaking addition to the literary study of this iconic and controversial figure,” offering “urgent and exciting new insights into life-writing and how we read and interpret another’s life.”

BIO president Steve Paul echoed the enthusiasm. “The enormous range and vibrancy of the Plutarch finalists are indicative of what seems like a surprising energy in our world of biography,” he said. “Many thanks to the Plutarch jury for choosing such a fascinating winner as Francesca Wade’s book about Stein.”

Wade is also the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars. A London-based journalist, her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

The 2026 Plutarch Committee — Neil Baldwin, Emily Bernard, Mary Dearborn (Chair), Andrea Pitzer, and Sydney Stern — considered more than 150 titles from the US and UK. A longlist of ten was announced in March, followed by five finalists in April.

The other four finalists were Nicholas Boggs, James Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright Publishing); Max Perry Mueller, Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books); and Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life (Pegasus Books).

The remaining five longlisted titles were Daniel Brook, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (W.W. Norton); Kate Culkin, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press); Ruth Franklin, The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press); Sue Prideaux, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (W.W. Norton); and Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Jeremy Lybarger Named Inaugural Recipient of the Clio Fellowship for Archival Research

April 24th, 2026

Jeremy Lybarger has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Clio Fellowship for Archival Research for his biography of Roger Brown, the Chicago artist known for his boldly figurative paintings and his pivotal role in American art history. Lybarger will use the $5,000 prize to conduct research at the Kohler Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where Brown’s papers are archived.

“Winning the inaugural Clio Fellowship for Archival Research is a meaningful honor,” said Lybarger. “It provides crucial support for deep, on-site research while also affirming the value of this project. As a first-time biographer, that vote of confidence will sustain me through the long, sometimes lonely, often overwhelming work of writing a life. Roger Brown was a scrupulous custodian of his own legacy, saving nearly every scrap of paper he touched; I like to think he’d be pleased to know his recordkeeping is being put to use.”

The Clio Fellowship is endowed by Linda Leavell, a Plutarch Award-winning biographer and past president of Biographers International Organization. It supports one or more biographers in traveling to archival collections related to their biographical book project. Named for Clio, the Greek muse of history and memory, the fellowship aims to reduce the financial barriers that the cost of essential archival work can present to biographers.

“From a large pool of excellent applications, the committee members were very impressed with Jeremy’s proposal for his biography of the ‘defiantly Midwestern’ artist Roger Brown, a project under contract with the University of Chicago Press,” said Natalie Dykstra, award committee chair. “His clear and vivid prose showed not only a wonderful command of Brown’s under-examined story but also its importance to American art history.”

Lybarger’s writing has appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He has received grants and fellowships from Lambda Literary, the Graham Foundation, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. In 2025, he was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. He is a senior editor at Poetry magazine in Chicago.

The fellowship selection committee was composed of Natalie Dykstra, Pamela D. Toler, and Maryemma Graham.

2026 Plutarch Award Shortlist Announced

April 16th, 2026

A panel of judges from BIO has narrowed down the 10 nominees for the 14th annual Plutarch Award to five. The titles, listed below, include feedback from the awards committee:

• Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — “Nicholas Boggs delivers fresh insights on the life of a beloved American literary and political hero with this moving and beautifully-composed biography that reveals how novel perspectives can generate new ways of looking at a life.”
• Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright) — “In his complex, engrossing biography of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first independent prime minister, Howard French situates Africa’s decolonization within the context of international Pan-Africanism and the U.S. civil rights movements.”
• Max Perry Mueller, Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books) — “In startlingly innovative fashion, insisting that Native American history and biography deserve an entirely new approach, Max Perry Mueller limns the Native chief Wakara, an elusive but central figure in the shaping of the American Southwest.”
• Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner) — “Francesca Wade combines an examination of Gertrude Stein’s life and work with an engrossing account of the struggle over her posthumous reputation, which began with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, and after many decades, eventually included Wade herself.”
• Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life (Pegasus Books) — “In this riveting biography, Graham Watson interrogates how Charlotte Brontë’s story came to be written, shedding new light on not only the Victorian writer but the construction and nature of biography itself.”

Of the 10 books longlisted, BIO President Steve Paul said, “This is such an impressive list of books, which speaks to the robust state of the craft of biography. We are always grateful for the time and effort our judges put into highlighting the great work of biography.”

The Plutarch Award is the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. The winner will be announced during the 2026 BIO Conference, occurring May 28 and 29 at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. View past Plutarch winners here.

Samantha Ege and Heath Brown Win 2026 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowships

April 13th, 2026

Samantha Ege and Heath Brown are the recipients of the 2026 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, awarded for biographical works-in-progress that significantly advance our understanding of the Black experience. Both writers impressed the selection committee with their vividly rendered portraits of very different subjects, each engaging and accessible to a broad general audience.

Ege won for her project, Fabulous Is the Word: The Life and Legend of Nora Douglas Holt, a biography of the Harlem Renaissance-era nonpareil who was a pioneering musicologist, composer, critic, and, as she put it, “sensual socialite.”

Brown won for his project, The Pilot of Jonestown, a biography of Norman Ijames, a Black aviator who was fatefully connected to the 1978 cult massacre at Jonestown, Guyana, a tragedy that is still seared in modern memory.

Samantha Ege is a music historian and concert pianist renowned for her work on 20th-century Black women in classical music. Her 2024 New York Times article on Nora Holt, “The Curious Case of ‘Naughty Little Nora,’ a Jazz Age Shape Shifter,” was celebrated for introducing readers to this important yet forgotten figure. Her book South Side Impresarios was widely praised, and her scholarship extends to major publications, broadcasts, and performances. As a concert pianist, she has performed internationally, championing composers such as Holt, Florence Price, and Margaret Bonds. Named a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 2025, Ege has built an influential career on her path to reshaping musical history.

Heath Brown is a professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, and his master’s and PhD from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. His several books on politics and history include his most recent on the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris presidential transition: Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the White House (University Press of Kansas, 2024). Previously, he studied radical religious movements like the Tea Party and conservative homeschooling. He’s also written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly magazines, as well as appeared on CNN and MSNBC.

The 2026 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship marks our sixth year. When we hatched out the award’s parameters and guidelines in 2020, we felt certain that countless untold biographies were waiting out there to deepen our understanding of Black experience across the Americas — and the response proved it. Yearly, a wide range of writers have answered the call. That momentum continues to grow. The CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography just introduced the David Levering Lewis Fellowship on the African Diaspora. Funded by the esteemed biographer’s $1 million gift, which is to be matched by the Leon Levy Foundation. As a past Leon Levy Biography Fellow, I’m excited to see the Rollin Fellowship and the Lewis Fellowship working with kindred aims to champion and expand the field of Black biography.

— Eric K. Washington, Chair, The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship

BIO’s Rollin Fellowship, named for Frances (“Frank”) Anne Rollin Whipper, one of America’s first recorded African American biographers, seeks to help remediate the disproportionate reflection of Black lives and voices in published biography and to encourage diversity in the field. BIO launched the Rollin Fellowship in 2020 and first presented an award of $2,000 to a single winner in May 2021 and again in 2022. As of May 2023, with a generous donation from Kitty Kelley, BIO increased the award to $5,000 each for two winners. The fellowship also awards the recipients a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO Conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels. This year’s Rollin Prize Committee consisted of Eric K. Washington (chair), Tamara Payne, and Emily Bernard.

T.J. Stiles Honored with the 2026 BIO Award

April 6th, 2026

T.J. Stiles, noted author of bestselling books about historical American figures, has been chosen to receive the 2026 BIO Award from Biographers International Organization (BIO). Established in 2010, the annual award honors an individual who has advanced the art and craft of biography. The award will be presented on May 29, 2026, at BIO’s annual conference in New York City.

“The BIO Awards Committee is excited to present this award to T.J. Stiles,” said Kathleen Stone, chair of the committee. “As an author, he is dedicated to exploring history through the stories of individual lives. His innovative choice of subjects covers a wide range, from General George Custer to Jesse James to Cornelius Vanderbilt, thereby enlarging our understanding of our history. ”

T.J. has previously received many honors for his work. Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Spur Award for Best Western Biography, and the William H. Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt was honored with the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War received the 2003 Ambassador Book Award.

Stiles is a member of BIO’s Advisory Council. A past Guggenheim Fellow, NEH Public Scholar, and Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he also practices and teaches traditional karate with the Japan Karate Association. A native of rural Minnesota, he now lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two children. He is currently working on a biography of Theodore Roosevelt.

The BIO Award recognizes a colleague who has made distinguished contributions to the art and craft of biography. Previous honorees are, in alphabetical order, Kai Bird, Taylor Branch, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, Richard Holmes, Kitty Kelley, Hermione Lee, David Levering Lewis, Megan Marshall, Candice Millard, James McGrath Morris, Dawn Porter, Arnold Rampersad, Stacy Schiff, Jean Strouse, and Claire Tomalin.

Stiles will deliver the keynote address at the 2026 BIO Conference on Friday, May 29, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

2026 Plutarch Award Longlist Announced

March 17th, 2026

A panel of judges from BIO has selected 10 nominees for the 14th annual Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers.

“The Plutarch Award Committee is delighted to offer our selections for the ten best biographies published in 2025. We read close to two hundred books covering the most diverse set of imaginable subjects…and were impressed with a great many, which made our task a gratifying challenge,” says Mary Dearborn, Chair of the Awards Committee. “We found that those we valued most highly were both compellingly written…and outstandingly researched in terms of depth, quality, and in many cases, originality of approach. After our year of reading biographically, we’re extremely excited about the books we chose, ample evidence that the genre of biography is alive and thriving in the literary world.”

BIO President Steve Paul added, “This is such an impressive list of books, which speaks to the robust state of the craft of biography. We are always grateful for the time and effort our judges put into highlighting the great work of biography.”

The titles, listed below, include feedback from the awards committee:

• Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — “Nicholas Boggs delivers fresh insights on the life of a beloved American literary and political hero with this moving and beautifully-composed biography that reveals how novel perspectives can generate new ways of looking at a life.”
• Daniel Brook, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (W. W. Norton & Company) — “In this remarkable biography, Daniel Brook resurrects a forgotten genius whose revolutionary ideas about sex and gender made him a target of Nazi ire and an inspiration to generations of innovative thinkers.”
• Kate Culkin, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press) — “Kate Culkin’s examination of the personalities, experiences, and work of Ellen and Edith Emerson provides an important contribution to Transcendentalist history and a wittily corrective portrait of a famous father and the daughters upon whom he relied.”
• Ruth Franklin, The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press) — “Ruth Franklin introduces you to an Anne Frank you never knew; in gorgeous prose, she reinvigorates Anne’s world and reveals her surprising afterstory.”
• Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright) — “In his complex, engrossing biography of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first independent prime minister, Howard French situates Africa’s decolonization within the context of international Pan-Africanism and the U.S. civil rights movements.”
• Max Perry Mueller, Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books) — “In startlingly innovative fashion, insisting that Native American history and biography deserve an entirely new approach, Max Perry Mueller limns the Native chief Wakara, an elusive but central figure in the shaping of the American Southwest.”
• Sue Prideaux, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (W. W. Norton & Company) — “With virtuosic spirit of place, pivoting from 19th century Paris to exotic Tahiti, Sue Prideaux sheds new light upon the iconoclastic autodidact Paul Gauguin, interweaving the omnivorous, indomitable life of her so-called WILD THING artist with his resplendently uninhibited paintings.”
• Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — “In Pride and Pleasure, a seamless epic of our Founding Era, Amanda Vaill spins the ambitious, cunning lives of the Schuyler sisters, Amanda and Eliza—wife of Alexander Hamilton—as they play out against the complex politics of the American Revolution; the result is a dual biography redolent of romance and intrigue.”
• Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner) — “Francesca Wade combines an examination of Gertrude Stein’s life and work with an engrossing account of the struggle over her posthumous reputation, which began with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, and after many decades, eventually included Wade herself.”
• Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life (Pegasus Books) — “In this riveting biography, Graham Watson interrogates how Charlotte Brontë’s story came to be written, shedding new light on not only the Victorian writer but the construction and nature of biography itself.”

The winner will be announced during the 2026 BIO Conference, occurring May 28 and 29 at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. View past Plutarch winners here.

Carla Hayden to Receive 2026 Biblio Award from BIO

March 10th, 2026

Carla Hayden, a senior fellow at the Mellon Foundation and former Librarian of Congress, will receive Biographers International Organization’s 2026 Biblio Award, honoring a notable archivist. Since 2012, (BIO) has presented the Biblio Award annually to recognize a librarian or archivist who has made an exceptional contribution to the craft of biography. This year, it will be presented at BIO’s annual conference in New York City on May 28, 2026.

At the Mellon Foundation, Dr. Hayden is pursuing scholarship, writing, and research projects. She also serves as a strategic partner and counsel to the Foundation on ways to support and advance libraries, archives, and other organizations in the public knowledge ecosystem.

Previously, she was the 14th Librarian of Congress, the first woman and first African American to lead the national library. She served in that position from 2016 to 2025, where her goal was to make the Library and its unparalleled collections more accessible to the public. She was fired by President Trump in May 2025. She introduced new audiences to many of the Library’s treasures – from Frederick Douglass’s papers, to the contents of President Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night of his assassination, to James Madison’s crystal flute made famous by Lizzo.

Before she served as Librarian, Dr. Hayden was the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, deputy commissioner and chief librarian of the Chicago Public Library, assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Pittsburgh, and library services coordinator for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. She began her career with the Chicago Public Library. 

Among her numerous civic and professional memberships and awards, Dr. Hayden is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“By presenting this award to Dr. Carla Hayden, BIO expresses its appreciation of her work as a librarian, and reaffirms its commitment, which it shares with her, of bringing life stories and history to the public,” said Kathleen Stone, chair of BIO’s Awards Committee.