Nan A. Talese Wins Editorial Excellence Award

October 12th, 2016

BIO president Will Swift looks on after presenting Nan A. Talese with the Editorial Excellence Award.

Biographers International Organization gave Nan A. Talese its Editorial Excellence Award at the New York Society Library on October 5. Almost 100 people turned out to honor Talese, including several of the authors she has worked with over the years, such as Judy Collins, Anne Heller, and A. E. Hotchner. Other guests from the publishing world included Sonny Mehta, Louis Begley, Robert MacNeill, and Robert Caro, who called the event one of the great literary evenings in New York. Talese joins Robert Gottlieb and Jonathan Segal as winners of the Editorial Excellence Award.

Fall Season Offers Many Notable New Biographies

September 9th, 2016

As is often the case, biographies of literary figures and political leaders fill the list of titles most likely to receive media attention in the coming months, and several BIO members have books coming out that critics have already reviewed positively or are awaiting with anticipation.

We’re highlighting here some of the biographies already generating a buzz—because of their subject, their author, or both—as featured in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Amazon. You can see a longer list of upcoming biographies here.

TBC does its best to learn about new books, and our monthly In Stores feature will include even more fall and winter titles. Should we have missed any members’ upcoming releases, please let us know so we can add them to the list on the website. And keep in mind that publishing dates change, so some books may come out earlier or later than indicated here.

The list of eagerly waited literary biographies is bookended with works from two members: Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life in September and Megan Marshall’s Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, out in February. During the rest of the fall season, other notable literary biographies include Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade, an October release; Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, due out in December; and two January titles, In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown by Amy Gary and Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel by John Stubbs. Also out in February will be Kay Redfield Jamison’s Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character.

Turning to subjects known for other artistic endeavors, BIO member Brian Jay Jones tops the list with his George Lucas: A Life, which will be released in December. The other biographies of musicians, filmmakers, and artists drawing attention include Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff, and Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff, both out this month; Peter Ackroyd’s Alfred Hitchcock and Franny Moyle’s Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J.M.W. Turner, both October releases; Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White by Michael Tisserand in December; and Molly Haskell’s Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films, which is slated for January.

Political and military figures featured in upcoming biographies include several U.S. presidents, British leaders, and at least one spy. The Roosevelts once again seem to dominate the political listings, with these titles among the many coming out over the next few months: His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt by Joseph Lelyveld and Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady, both out in September; Blanche Wiesen Cook’s third volume of her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, The War Years and After, 1939–1962, out in October; and The Wars of the Roosevelts: The Ruthless Rise of America’s Greatest Political Family by William J. Mann, scheduled for January.

Addressing British politics and government, Julia Baird has Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire out in November, while the next month Penguin’s Monarch series will release William I: England’s Conqueror by Marc Morris.

Other notable biographies in the politics and military category include Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America’s Free Press by Richard Kluger and the first volume of a new biography of Adolf Hitler by Volker Ullrich, both out in September. Also coming this month is Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton by Joe Conason, and former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Charles Gates Dawes gets his first major biography, courtesy of member Annette B. Dunlap. In October, the struggles of a president and a general fill H.W. Brands’s new book, The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War. That month, two members have releases with military or espionage themes: Andrew Lownie with the U.S. publication of Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring; and William C. Davis with Inventing Loreta Velasquez, the story of a woman who claimed to have fought as a male Confederate soldier but was actually a con artist.

Biographical subjects from the worlds of business and academia appear in several of the season’s books. The September titles include A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest to Recover from Great Success by Tracy Kidder, and BIO member Robert Kanigel’s Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacob. Lisa Napoli, another member, will publish Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away in November.

Finally, turning away from the tumult of politics, war, and business, several subjects with a more spiritual bent will also be part of the coming season. In February comes Albert Schweitzer: A Biography by Nils Ole Oermann, and Yale University Press adds to its Jewish Lives series in November with Moses: A Human Life by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.

BIO Marks the Passing of Former Board Member Chip Bishop

August 9th, 2016

Long-time BIO board member and former Plutarch Award judge Chip Bishop died on August 5. His lifetime of achievements includes time as a campaign and administration aide to President Jimmy Carter, Capitol Hill lobbyist, entrepreneur, local elected official, and 1960s-era disc-jockey. Chip was on the Advisory Board of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the executive committee of its New England chapter. A Tortured Soul, his long-anticipated biography of Elliott Roosevelt, T.R.’s brother and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s father, will be published by ForeEdge in 2017.

The September issue of The Biographer’s Craft will include tributes from the BIO members who knew him best.

Biographer Explores the Life of a Film Pioneer—Her Father

August 9th, 2016

Radha Chadha is a brand consultant as well as a first-time biographer.

If BIO gave an award to the member who ventured the farthest for its annual conference, Radha Chadha would have taken it for 2016. Originally from India, Chadha traveled from her current home in Dubai to Richmond for this year’s event, after being introduced to BIO by TBCNew York correspondent Dona Munker. The path to meeting Munker intersected with Chadha’s effort to write a biography of her father, the documentary filmmaker and producer Jagat Murari.

As Chadha told TBC via email, she was going through her late father’s papers in Pune, a city near Mumbai, when she discovered diaries going back to his days as a film student at USC shortly after World War II. The diaries mentioned a Persian princess named Sattareh Farman Farmaian, whom Murari had met at the school. Farmaian, Chadha learned, had written an autobiography with Dona Munker’s assistance, so Chadha contacted the BIO member, starting a relationship that has been very fruitful for the rookie biographer. Chadha said that Munker “has been amazing—very generous and full of helpful advice that a first-time biographer like me thirsts for. I found the same generous spirit at the BIO conference in Richmond. I am simply delighted to be part of this group.”

What led Chadha to tackle the challenge of writing about her father’s life? Part of it was wanting to tell the story of a key figure in postwar India filmmaking. “He has a fascinating story of achievements that even I didn’t know properly,” Chadha said. “He is a pioneer in the Indian cinema world, both as a documentary filmmaker and a film educator.

Murari directed nearly 50 films, and many of them won national and international awards and were screened at some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. As an educator, Chadha said, her father was “in a sense…the man who changed Bollywood, who injected a steady stream of professionally trained directors, technicians, and actors into India’s prolific but chaotic film industry from the 1960s onwards.” Murari did that work as the head of the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), which he created. “Think about it,” Chadha said. “Just a dozen years after India’s independence, in a desperately underdeveloped country, he builds the finest film school in India; it becomes the largest in Asia. His students become the who’s who of Bollywood, as well as the instigators and key players in the New Wave cinema movement that picked up steam in the late 1960s in India.”

Chadha was also drawn to her father’s story because his work in cinema is a part of modern India’s history that has largely gone untold. His documentaries, she said, “tell the story of India’s attempts to develop and unite a fragile nation, they capture a certain innocence or idealism of the times as India tried to ingrain the spirit of democracy in a vast, far-flung, diverse, poor, largely illiterate country.”

Jagat Murari (right) receives an honor from Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1956.

Adding some spice to the story, it doesn’t hurt that Murari did an internship with Orson Welles while the director was making Macbeth¸ and that he later met world-famous directors as they passed through India. And for a time, Indira Gandhi’s role as the country’s Minister of Information and Broadcasting effectively made her Murari’s boss.

Asked how to balance the desire to be objective while writing about a parent, Chadha called that “the heart of the dilemma I face—how to do your duty as a biographer (by being as objective as possible) while doing your duty as a daughter (by presenting him in the best light possible).” Chadha is turning to her father’s filmmaking as a guide of sorts. Above all, she said, her father was a dramatic storyteller, “and every good story is ultimately a tussle between the forces of good and bad… the forces that propel your character forward and the forces that prevent him from getting where he wants to…. Fortunately, my material has plenty of drama built in—he was strong-willed, he was a visionary, he was in a tearing hurry, he made things happen against formidable odds…. He made enemies along the way, he made mistakes, there were ups, yes, but there were some pretty awful downs. Much as I love him, it would be totally counterproductive to write an I-love-my-daddy puff piece. I just have to get out of the way and tell the story.”

Chadha has some advice and caveats for other biographers thinking of writing about a close relative: “Of course, talking to other people is a great help. But people are not forthcoming about the negative stuff—in fact, one of my surprising learnings is that many elderly people haven’t told me the truth. I had naively imagined that “age equals honesty”—it doesn’t. But if you talk to enough people, you will get to the truth, a few will spill the beans. And every interview, even the sketchy ones, gives you a sense of what might have happened. Soon you begin to notice contradictions, and that leads to many ‘aha’ moments. It is detective work, but so much fun when you figure out someone’s motives. More importantly, it helps you develop a considered viewpoint, and ultimately, that’s what matters. I think the only way to write convincingly is to be convinced.”

Many of the people Chadha hoped to interview had passed away, but even talking to their surviving spouses or children helped. “It has led me to books/articles/speeches (often in languages that have needed translation) that I would not have found without the family’s help. Even better, it has led me to colleagues who are alive. For example, I stumbled upon a 94-year-old man who had studied with my father at USC—they had even shared a room for a short period.”

Chadha also benefited from her father’s being something of a celebrity for most of his career, so newspapers covered his activities. “But again,” she added, “I have learned that they don’t necessarily tell the truth—there are vested interests, there is careless reporting—you have to test the information with your other sources.” Her father was a controversial figure, Chadha said, as some critics accused him of being too enamored of a commercial, Hollywood style of filmmaking when other countries were moving toward the French New Wave approach. As Murari got caught up in the debates, the reporting on him was a “mixed bag.” Overall, Chadha said, trying to remain objective while writing about a famous parent put her on high alert: “You simply try harder. You try to get multiple viewpoints from multiple sources.”

The sources included, of course, Murari’s films, which Chadha said helped her learn who he was as both a filmmaker and a human being. She also studied the films of his students. In the Bollywood vs. New Wave debate, she thinks her father saw value in both approaches. “His aim was to make ‘better cinema’—through professionally trained filmmakers—never mind which side of the fence that cinema came from.”

Today, India has the largest film industry in the world, producing up to 2,000 full-length movies each year. Both splashy Bollywood spectacles and more serious art-house films are shown around the globe. Radha Chadha is still uncovering the role her father played in creating that industry. “It is,” she said, “a story that needs to be told.”

Sullivan Wins 2016 Plutarch Award

June 6th, 2016

Rosemary Sullivan won the 2016 Plutarch Award for Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Read more about the Plutarch, this year’s semi-finalists, and the winners of special awards for excellence here, and look for more on Sullivan and her honor in the July issue of The Biographer’s Craft.

BIO Sponsors Biography Beyond Borders Colloquium in Oxford

May 24th, 2016

In collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Oxford, housed at Wolfson College and directed by Professor Dame Hermione Lee, Biography International Organization (BIO) is hosting Biography Beyond Borders, a colloquium on American and European biography. The colloquium is 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 5. Lee will deliver the afternoon’s keynote address, and distinguished American biographer Carla Kaplan will give  lecture the previous evening at the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College, London.

Click here for more information and to register.

Biographers Grapple with the Many Facets of Nixon

May 7th, 2016

In a preview of the BIO Conference panel “Three Ways of Looking at a Subject: Richard Nixon,” moderator John A. Farrell explores the presidential subject with two of the panelists.

Lincoln, we know. The Roosevelts, we get. Of Kennedy, we probably know too much. But the roster of American presidents still presents a few white whales for biographers to chase—chief executives whose lives don’t yield characterization easily. Jefferson has been called a sphinx. Reagan opaque. And then there is Richard Nixon.

The challenge in writing a life of Nixon is not a shortage of material; it’s partly that there is so much: millions of documents and thousands of hours of tape recordings; archives chock-full of videotape from the Vietnam War and Watergate; countless newspaper articles and columns and books about the Tricky Dick of the 1950s, the various New Nixons that ran for president, and the tragic chief executive who went to China, signed an arms deal with the Soviet Union, won a landslide re-election, and resigned in disgrace. The vast sea of material makes fishing for Nixon an arduous task. So does his personality, which aide H. R. Haldeman compared to a piece of quartz, with its many, many facets.

Compounding the difficulty is the polarizing nature of the man, and of his times. For most of his political career, often deliberately, he divided the citizenry into those that loved Nixon, and them that hated him with unyielding passion. He came on the scene as an ally of Joe McCarthy. He implied that Harry Truman was a traitor, and was throughout an unforgiving partisan hatchet man. “If the dry rot of corruption and Communism, which has eaten deep into our body politic during the past seven years, can only be chopped out with a hatchet, let’s call for a hatchet,” he said, campaigning, in 1952.

And his enemies—the liberals, academics, Democrats and journalists who Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew attacked as impudent snobs and effete intellectuals—gave as good as they got.

“The American lower middle class in the person of this man moved to engrave into the history of the United States, as the voice of America, its own faltering spirit, its self-pity and its envy…its whole peevish, resentful whine,” the liberal New York columnist Murray Kempton wrote.

For the upcoming BIO conference in Richmond, three recent Nixon biographers—Evan Thomas, Being Nixon; Jeffrey Frank, Ike and Dick; and Irwin Gellman, The Contender and The President and the Apprentice—will join me on a Saturday afternoon panel, and talk about our turns as Captain Ahab. I quizzed two of them about the hunt last month.

Q: What special challenge does a polarizing figure like Nixon present? Is the historic record accurate, or does it reflect the political bias about Nixon from his era? How do you navigate these shoals?
Jeffrey Frank: The challenge is not to start off regarding him as a ‘polarizing’ figure, but rather to try to see him plainly—to let his life and times guide.
Evan Thomas: I worked for The Washington Post for 24 years, and…Nixon was the devil—an evil figure, corrupter of the Constitution, Tricky Dick. That is pretty much the view that has taken hold in the public generally, certainly in the so-called liberal establishment.
The Watergate era record makes Nixon look like a madman. The fuller record is more complex.
His reputation and standing will never escape Watergate, nor should it. But I wanted to humanize him. I tried to look at Nixon from the inside out. To understand his own sense of outsider-ness. To see what it was like, literally, to be Nixon.
“I can’t pretend to know with anything approaching certainty what Nixon was really feeling and thinking. I’m not sure Nixon himself did. He was, as far as I could tell from the record he left, remarkably un-self aware. He brooded constantly—about his enemies—and he felt deep insecurity. But he did not know his own weaknesses, not in a way he could control.
I once asked (Nixon aide) Brent Scowcroft if Nixon could see himself. No, answered Scowcroft, “but sometimes, I think, he took a peek.” That sounds about right to me.

Q: Is there a difference in how the generations of Americans view Nixon?
Jeffrey Frank: I’ve found that the Boomers still pretty much loathe him, although some try to see his better side. The Millennials see him as a cartoon —the Evil President, a little comic, too.

Q: After publication, did you find critics and readers open to your interpretation, or were they bound by their own political viewpoint?
Jeffrey Frank: I wondered whether some would see me as too sympathetic to Nixon, but in fact I think most were pretty open to what I was doing—not to sound pompous but trying to be, ahem, fair and balanced.
Evan Thomas: A mixed or somewhat forgiving picture of Nixon is not going to satisfy the large population of Nixon haters, especially those whose careers have been wrapped up in the view of Nixon as Monster. Since those same people were likely to review my book, I feared I would take my lumps, and I did. But I never had so much fun writing a book.”

Q: What are you hoping to learn from the other members of our panel?
Jeffrey Frank: I’m interested in hearing how the picture of Nixon began to change as other biographers drew closer to him—learning more about him, good and bad. Did he become more a “rounded” figure, and therefore more interesting, or did he simply seem to remain an unwavering partisan, and therefore increasingly tedious? Or a little of both?

John A. Farrell’s single-volume biography of Nixon will be published early next year.

2016 Election

April 18th, 2016

The following are election statements and biographies submitted by candidates for BIO’s President, Vice President, and the BIO Board of Directors. In 2016, there are nine board seats up for election, each with a two year term running from 2016 to 2018. The terms for President and Vice President are also for two years, from 2016 to 2018.

For President

Will Swift

Will Swift is a founding board member of BIO and chairs its Awards Committee. He created the Editorial Excellence Award and co-founded the BIO mentorship program. Will has served as a judge on both the Hazel Rowley and Plutarch Award committees. As president he would like to focus on four major areas: increasing BIO membership, fundraising, developing new programs to educate BIO members and the public, and increasing the visibility of BIO in the literary world. Will is working with Deidre David to set up an international biography conference at Oxford in November, 2016. He would like to see further development of such international exchanges.

Will is the author of three books on presidents and their families. His Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of a Marriage (January, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Plutarch Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His previous books are The Roosevelts and the Royals (2004) and The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm (2008).

For Vice President

Deirdre A. David

Deirdre David has been a member of the BIO Board for two years; she has also served on the program and Plutarch committees. Currently, she is coordinating a collaborative effort to bring European and American biographers together for a one-day Colloquium to be held at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing in November. Last year’s Plutarch winner, Hermione Lee, will be the keynote speaker. Deirdre sees the role of the vice-president as supporting the president’s leadership and initiatives, as managing efficiently the administrative tasks involved, and as being a representative for BIO at domestic and international conferences and forums.

After a long career teaching Victorian literature and publishing five books about the novel, women’s writing, and imperialism, Deirdre became a biographer with publication of a book about the British actress Fanny Kemble, followed by a biography of the British novelist Olivia Manning. She is completing a biography of the writer Pamela Hansford Johnson, under contract to Oxford UP.

For Board of Directors

(These statements are presented alphabetically, by candidate’s last name. They will be presented on your ballot in random order.)

Kate Buford

My best-selling Burt Lancaster: An American Life (Knopf/Da Capo/UK: Aurum) was named one of the best books of 2000 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others. Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Knopf 2010; U. of Nebraska Press paperback 2012) was an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times and won several awards. I have written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Film Comment and other publications, have been a featured speaker at many events, and was a commentator from 1995-2003 on NPR’s Morning Edition and APM’s Marketplace. A member of BIO and PEN, I also serve on the board of Union Settlement Association in East Harlem, NYC.

I have been involved with BIO since its formative meeting in 2009 and have served on panels at each annual conference since then. Abby Santamaria and I created the annual BIO Biblio Award in 2012, now given at each conference to a worthy archivist or research librarian, and founded Biography By Design, LLC in 2016. I currently serve on the BIO Conference Site and Program Committees. I would be honored to continue to contribute to the hard work yet to be done to expand member outreach and to raise BIO’s public profile.

Cathy Curtis

I joined BIO in 2011 while researching my first biography. Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter was published by Oxford University Press last year. In 2017, my next book, Quicksilver: The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning, will inaugurate the Oxford Cultural Biographies series.

Since 2013, I have been a member of the BIO Board; two years ago, I was elected vice president. The best part of that job has been the opportunity to work with BIO’s savvy and collegial directors. As a former chair of the Program Committee, I served as a frequent sounding board for issues pertaining to our annual conference. My other activities as vice president included writing and editing BIO communications, responding to members’ queries, helping run the Coaching Committee, and contributing a column toThe Biographer’s Craft. Recently invited to join the Rowley Prize and Plutarch Award committees, I am looking forward to engaging with a full spectrum of life writing—from proposals by newcomers to the genre to biographies by seasoned authors.

BIO is still in an adolescent phase as an organization, desperately in need of more members and increased funding even as we continue to mount stimulating, broad-based conferences featuring some of the most celebrated names in biography. As a Board member, I will continue to encourage increased participation in volunteer efforts to enlarge and sustain our indispensable organization.

Annette Dunlap

Annette Dunlap is the author of Frank, The Story of Frances Folsom Cleveland, America’s Youngest First Lady, published in hardback in 2009 and released in paperback in 2015 by SUNY Press. Her second book, The Gambler’s Daughter: A Personal and Social Memoir, was published by SUNY Press in 2012, while her third book, Charles Gates Dawes: A Life — commissioned by the Evanston (IL) History Center — will be released by Northwestern University Press in August 2016. Annette was a Hoover Presidential Scholarship recipient in 2013 and 2014 to research a biography on Lou Henry Hoover. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s First Ladies series, and her presentation at the Hoover Presidential Library on First Ladies and the Politics of Fashion aired in September 2014. She also served as a panelist at 2015’s Harding Symposium on the first ladies Florence Harding, Grace Coolidge, and Lou Hoover, which was broadcast live by C-SPAN. She is presently completing a biography of Louis Comfort Tiffany for SUNY Press.

As a Board member, Annette would like to see BIO continue to foster the professional development of biographers at all stages of their careers, and to encourage public interest in biography as a genre.

John A. Farrell

In a long career as a journalist, primarily with The Boston Globe, Jack served as White House correspondent and covered Congress, the Supreme Court and every American presidential campaign since 1980.  He also was Washington bureau chief for The Denver Post, and the MediaNews chain. He has reported from Northern Ireland, Iraq, Israel and other foreign nations. In 2011, he served as a senior political correspondent for The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit center for investigative journalism in Washington, D.C.

He is the author of Clarence Darrow: Attorney For The Damned, a biography of America’s greatest defense attorney, and of Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, the definitive account of House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and his times. He recently completed Richard Nixon: An American Tragedy, a biography of that most enigmatic 37th president of the United States.

As a board member, he would like to explore ways to expand the BIO universe by honoring and involving folks like Ken Burns, Lin-Manuel Miranda or the American Experience gang, who bring biography to life in other media.

Gayle Feldman

I am fortunate to have been associated with BIO from its first meeting, and to have seen it grow to be a grassroots organization that really does matter to members and the field.  I bring an institutional memory of how far we have come and sense of where we might go.

My involvement has encompassed speaking on/moderating panels, publicity outreach, and spearheading as committee chairperson the Hazel Rowley Prize for best proposal for a first biography, which this year we are awarding for the second time. I’d like to remain on the board one more term to see Rowley Award firmly established and to ensure a smooth handover to a new chairperson.

I have worked in the publishing business my whole career, first as a book editor in London, then as a senior editor at Publishers Weekly, and now as New York correspondent for The Bookseller. I am writing my third book but first biography, a life of Bennett Cerf, under contract to Random House, the company he cofounded.

Beverly Gray

I’ve been a professor of English at USC, the longtime story editor for B-movie legend Roger Corman, a freelance journalist, and a screenwriting instructor for UCLA Extension’s celebrated Writers’ Program. My first book, Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking, debuted on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. The updated paperback and ebook editions have been tastefully retitled Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers. I’ve also published a second Hollywood biography, Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond.

As the hard-working local site chair of BIO’s 2012 Los Angeles conference, I was officially named a “goddess.” I have served for five years on BIO’s program committee, and have participated on a number of conference panels, either as moderator or speaker. I first became a member of the BIO board of directors in 2014. Given my movie interests, I’m working to see more attention paid to biopics and other non-traditional forms of biography. I am currently completing for Algonquin Books the tentatively-titled Where Have You Gone, Mrs. Robinson?, an account of the legacy of The Graduate, timed to reflect the fiftieth anniversary of the film’s release.

Dean King

Dean King is a nationally best-selling author of nine books, including Skeletons on the Zahara,  The Feud: The Hatfields & McCoys, and Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed. While conducting groundbreaking research around the globe, Dean has trekked the Sahara on camels, crossed the Snowy Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau in China on foot, gone undercover in Catalan France, and been shot at in West Virginia. He has appeared on NPR, the BBC, ABC World News Tonight, and as the lead storyteller on two History Channel documentaries. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Granta, Garden & Gun, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, New York Magazine, the New York Times, and Virginia Living, where he is a contributing editor. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Library of Virginia Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is a co-founder of the award-winning literary nonprofit James River Writers.

As a Board member, he would like to help the organization grow and broaden its appeal to a wider range of nonfiction writers. He would also like to help it improve its financial footing and continue to improve the quality and appeal of its conference. He has worked with the programming committee that past two years, contributing to a panel moderating guideline and helping to devise several panels.

Heath Lee

Heath comes from a museum education, preservation, and program background.  She holds a B.A. in History with Honors from Davidson College, and an M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. She started her museum career at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has since worked as a consultant for southern house museums such as Stratford Hall, Robert E. Lee’s birthplace, and Menokin Plantation.  She recently served as the Coordinator of the History Series for Salisbury House & Gardens, a 1920’s house museum in Des Moines, Iowa.  She currently works as the Editorial Assistant forThe Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

Potomac Books, a division of the University of Nebraska Press, published Heath’s first book, Winnie Davis:  Daughter of the Lost Cause, in 2014.  Winnie won the 2015 Colonial Dames of America Annual Book Award as well as a Gold Medal for Nonfiction writing from the Independent Publisher 2015 Book Awards. Heath is currently working on her second book, a group biography entitled The Reluctant Sorority:  the story of the courageous wives of officers who were Prisoners of War or Missing in Action during the Vietnam War.

If elected to the Board, Heath would like to see BIO grow its membership with those in the 35-55 demographic.  She would also like to help BIO launch a program to help funnel biographers into speaking engagements with established museums and schools.  She believes the future of BIO depends upon its members being “out there” in the communities they live in, selling their ideas-and their books, while also helping our museums and schools access BIO’s superb speakers.

Hans Renders

Hans Renders, a board member of BIO, lives in Amsterdam and holds a chair in History and Theory of Biography. He is the director of the Biography Institute, Groningen University and Vice-President of La Société de Biography/Biography Society . He is the editor of Le Temps des Médias; of Quaerendo. A Quarterly Journal from the Low Countries; and of ZL. Literary-historical magazine. He is a book critic for the newspaper Het Parool; and is also a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography (Vienna).

Biographers write better biographies when they’re aware of the theoretical implications of their work. In my experience, there’s no necessary gap between academic justified biography and biography which is interesting for the general public. We all want a biography to be a good read. But poor writing is everywhere, in and outside the academic world. I hope to bring in the European perspective to keep BIO a real international organization.

I’m currently working on the biography of Theo van Doesburg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Doesburg), the painter, poet and art theorist who founded together with Piet Mondrian the Style Movement.