Dawn Porter, American Documentary Filmmaker, Wins 2025 BIO Award

April 7th, 2025

Photo: Kevin Scanlon

Dawn Porter has been awarded the 2025 BIO Award, an honor bestowed annually by the Biographers International Organization, to a distinguished colleague who has made significant contributions to the art and craft of biography.

Porter is an acclaimed American documentary filmmaker and founder of Trilogy Films, known for her storytelling on social justice, history, and cultural icons. Her celebrated documentaries, including Trapped, John Lewis: Good Trouble, and The Lady Bird Diaries, air on platforms such as HBO, Netflix, CNN, and PBS. Her recent work, Luther: Never Too Much, highlights the life and legacy of Luther Vandross. Produced with Sony Music Entertainment, Jamie Foxx’s Foxxhole, and Colin Firth’s Raindog Films, this intimate portrayal of the Grammy-winning artist was released in theaters and premiered on CNN/MAX on January 1, 2025.

Porter’s achievements are widely recognized. Trapped earned a Peabody Award and the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Social Impact Filmmaking, while John Lewis: Good Trouble won the 2021 NAACP Image Award. She received the Critics’ Choice Impact Award in 2022 and Gracie Awards in both 2022 and 2023. Recently, Porter was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, awarded the National Humanities Medal by former President Joe Biden, and received the IDA Career Achievement Award.

Porter’s 2024 MSNBC series, The Sing Sing Chronicles, offers unprecedented access to the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, providing a raw look at justice and redemption. Coincidentally, Porter’s Lady Bird documentary was based on a book by BIO member Julia Sweig, who also served as an executive producer for the film.

A former attorney, Porter holds degrees from Swarthmore College and Georgetown Law. Known for elevating marginalized voices and illuminating U.S. history’s lesser-known stories, she is a prominent figure in documentary filmmaking. She resides in New York City.

Of her award, Porter said, “It is truly an honor to receive this award. I feel extraordinarily lucky that my career affords me the opportunity to immerse myself in the stories of so many fascinating and influential people. Thank you BIO for recognizing documentary biography as a discipline!”

“Having Dawn Porter as this year’s BIO Award recipient widens our lens on biography beyond books to include insightful and illuminating documentaries about Congressman John Lewis, Vernon Jordan, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, White House photographer Pete Souza, and Luther Vandross,” says awards committee member A’Lelia Bundles, author of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance. “Her films have brought these American stories to life for millions of viewers on several networks and streaming platforms including ESPN, HBO, PBS, CNN, and Netflix.”

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, Arnold Rampersad, Stacy Schiff, Jean Strouse, and Claire Tomalin.

Porter will deliver the keynote address at the 2025 BIO Conference on Friday, June 6th in Washington, DC.

Biography Lab Registration is Open!

December 11th, 2024

Biography Lab Registration is Open!

January 12th, 2024

Brandon R. Byrd and Lizzie Skurnick Win 2023 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowships

April 12th, 2023

Brandon R. Byrd and Lizzie Skurnick are the winners of the 2023 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for biographical works-in-progress that make a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience. Byrd and Skurnick are the first double recipients of this prize since best-selling biographer Kitty Kelley, a longtime BIO Board member, earmarked a major gift of $50,000 to the Rollin Fellowship in 2022.

Byrd has won for his biography-in-progress Pap: The Life and Legacies of Benjamin Singleton (forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press) and Skurnick has won for The Special Students: My Great-Grandfather at Harvard, His Mysterious Death, and the Rise of the Talented Tenth (forthcoming from Henry Holt & Company). The committee was impressed by Byrd’s engaging invocation of a Reconstruction-era Black emigrationist—a latter-day “Moses”—who led his people, through property ownership, to resist the forces of disenfranchisement. They were equally taken by Skurnick’s measured account of George Whitte Jordan, an ill-fated ancestor, who was among a coterie of early 20th century Black scholars that Harvard University once relegated to a discrete racial-caste category called “Special Students.”

Brandon R. Byrd  is a historian of Black intellectual and social history. He is an associate professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on African American history, United States history, Haiti, the Black Atlantic, and global Black thought, art, and politics. He is the author of  The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020, among other books.

Lizzie Skurnick  is a writer, editor, and cultural critic. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Her first book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, published by HarperCollins in 2009, is a literary and cultural history of young adult fiction based on her column of the same name.

Named for Frances (“Frank”) Anne Rollin Whipper, one of America’s first recorded African American biographers, BIO’s Rollin fellowship seeks to help remediate the disproportionate reflection of Black lives and voices in published biography and to encourage diversity in the field. The fellowship awards $5,000 to each of two recipients, along with a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO Conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels.

Anne Boyd Rioux Receives BIO’s Ray A. Shepard Service Award

June 10th, 2022

The Ray A. Shepard Award was presented at the 2022 BIO Conference to Anne Boyd Rioux, author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016) and Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018).  

The Shepard Award recognizes a BIO volunteer who has donated exceptionally of their time and talents for the benefit of the organization. It is named for Ray A. Shepard, a founding member of BIO who organized the first BIO Conference almost single-handedly. Rioux has served on BIO’s Board of Directors for five years. She has served as a co-chair for the BIO Conference Program Committee, and she is a member of the Membership Committee. She directs BIO’s Coaching Program and serves as a coach herself. 

While presenting the Shepard Award to Rioux, BIO President Linda Leavell said, “I first heard of Zoom from Anne, when she suggested that we conduct our board meetings that way, even before the pandemic happened.” She continued, “After we had to cancel the 2020 conference because of the pandemic, Anne suggested that we give BIO members an opportunity to meet online.” From this, Rioux initiated a series of workshops that summer on a range of topics, from marketing one’s book during the pandemic to copyright and fair use. This series of workshops has grown into BIO’s Online Events Committee, which Rioux now chairs. This past winter and spring, the committee hosted the “Reading Biography Like a Writer” series. “These workshops . . . provided BIO members a lifeline to our community during the pandemic,” Leavell said.  

Rioux also organized and supervised a series of online roundtables through BIO, which started in the summer of 2020. Leavell said, “In giving Anne the Ray Shepard Award, BIO recognizes her innovative ideas to keep BIO members connected with one another during the pandemic, and her extraordinary energy and talents in keeping those initiatives going.”  

Despite winning many awards in her career as a professor and writer, including four NEH fellowships, she said in her remarks, “I have never gotten an award quite like this, and it’s very moving.” She spoke of how, in the aftermath of the 2020 BIO Conference being canceled due to the pandemic, she was driven by a desire to keep members connected to each other. “Zoom was something that I got used to like everybody else,” she said, “but it was so easy to use and so easy for us to get together that way. I’m just really glad we’ve been able to stay connected. I think we’re even more connected now because of these periodic events. And I hope that this is a new tradition that BIO will continue, even once we’re meeting in person again, to keep us connected throughout the year.” 

Frances Wilson Wins 2022 Plutarch Award

May 17th, 2022

Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has won the 2022 Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2021. Wilson, a biographer and critic, is also the author of The Courtesan’s Revenge: The Life of Harriette Wilson, the Woman Who Blackmailed the King (Faber & Faber, 2003) How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (Harper, 2011), and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Guilty Thing was a finalist for the 2017 Plutarch Award.  

Named after the famous Greek writer, the Plutarch Award is presented annually by the Biographers International Organization to the best biography of the year, chosen by a committee of five distinguished biographers. The award comes with a $1,000 honorarium. 

In his remarks for the Plutarch Award ceremony, filmed in advance of and debuted at the 2022 BIO conference, Plutarch Award Committee Chair Nigel Hamilton said that the nearly 200 books reviewed for this year’s award were “a real testament to the ongoing golden age of biography that we still live in, despite the many trials our democracy is undergoing, especially, I might add, the assault on something we used to take for granted: telling the truth, the very viable truth based on real, not completely imaginary, facts.” 

In her acceptance remarks, Wilson said: “I see Burning Man as my American book. It was written for the most part when I was fortunate enough to be a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library in 2018. And I benefitted while I was living in New York, I benefitted enormously from the conviviality and generosity of other biographers, including the late great James Atlas, who I miss very much.” 

Wilson also spoke of the important influence New Mexico had upon both herself and Lawrence: “Lawrence rested all his hopes in America, which he saw as his paradise after the years in Hell. And while he of course inevitably quarreled with America, his experience of New Mexico was, he said, one of the most important in his life. I just want to quote what Lawrence said about New Mexico, because it’s so stunning and I absolutely agree with him: ‘The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul and I started to attend.’” 

In conclusion, BIO President Linda Leavell remarked upon the importance of Santa Fe to the founding of the organization, which Wilson agreed was a pleasant irony.  

Along with Hamilton, members of the 2022 Plutarch Award Committee were Heather Clark, Gretchen Gerzina, Catherine Reef, and Carl Rollyson. You can see the 2022 longlist here and the 2022 shortlist here.  

2022 Rowley Prize Winner Announced

April 8th, 2022

Laura Michele Diener has won the 2022 Rowley Prize.

The 2022 Hazel Rowley Prize Committee has named Laura Michele Diener as the winner of this year’s prize. The $2,000 prize is awarded annually to a first-time biographer and is accompanied by a careful reading from an established agent, a year’s membership in BIO, and publicity through the organization.

Diener has won the award for her proposal for a biography of the Norwegian-Danish writer Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), whom the committee called “an extraordinary woman who lived through tumultuous times.” After an unusual childhood under the tutelage of her archaeologist father, Undset worked as a secretary while attempting to earn a living as a writer. The success of her novels allowed her the freedom to travel to Italy, where she explored her spiritual yearnings and entered into a passionate but tormented marriage. It was the demise of that marriage and the financial demands of her children that led to the writing of her most famous works—sweeping historical novels of medieval Norway, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. In addition to her medieval work, she wrote innovative novels exploring the situation of contemporary women struggling to balance families and artistic longings.

Diener’s book project, which bears the working title A World Perilous and Beautiful, will be the first full-length, English-language biography of Undset, situating her within the intellectual and political crosscurrents of the first half of the 20th century.

Diener received her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction in 2015 from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published creative essays in multiple journals including Under the Sun, Dappled Things, and Numero Cinq. She attended Vassar College and earned her doctorate in history at Ohio State University in 2008. She has taught medieval and ancient history at Marshall University in West Virginia since 2008, where she directed the Women’s Studies program from 2014 to 2021. Her academic work focuses on women as authors and artists in the Middle Ages.

Diener is the eighth recipient of the BIO Hazel Rowley Prize, which has been awarded since 2014. She will accept the prize on Saturday, May 14, at the 2022 BIO Conference. The 2022 Hazel Rowley Prize Committee members were Natalie Dykstra (chair), Deborah Lutz, and Steve Paul.

Arrington, Goldstein Win 2022 Caro Research/Travel Fellowships

April 8th, 2022

The 2022 Caro Fellowship Committee, comprised of Carla Kaplan (chair), Marc Leepson, and Barbara Savage, has named two recipients for this year’s Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowships. The fellowships, established in 2018, allow BIO members with works in progress to receive funding for research trips to archives or to important settings in their subjects’ lives. This fellowship is a reflection of BIO’s ongoing commitment to support authors in writing beautifully contextualized and tenaciously researched biographies. This year’s recipients are Lauren Arrington and Bill Goldstein.

Lauren Arrington is the author of two previous group biographies, The Poets of Rapallo (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Revolutionary Lives (Princeton University Press, 2016), which were supported by fellowships at Cambridge University, Boston College, Trinity College Dublin, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Arrington earned her doctorate at Oxford University, and her essays have been commissioned by TLS, Literary Hub, and Public Books, among others. The Caro Fellowship will support Arrington’s research on the sculptor Lenore Thomas Straus, one of the women artists featured in Arrington’s current project about radical women artists working in Depression-era America.

Bill Goldstein reviews books and interviews authors for NBC’s “Weekend Today” in New York, and was the founding editor of The New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is writing a biography of Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown, having worked on the book as a 2019–2020 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. His book, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature, was published in 2017 by Henry Holt and Co.

Arrington and Goldstein will receive their awards on Saturday, May 14, during the 2022 BIO Conference.