Ramin Ganeshram and Kevin McGruder Win 2024 Rollin Fellowships

April 28th, 2024

Ramin Ganeshram (left) and Kevin McGruder (right).

Ramin Ganeshram and Kevin McGruder are the winners of the 2024 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for biographical works-in-progress that make a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience.   

Ramin Ganeshram won for her biographical project Stirring Liberty: How George Washington’s Enslaved Chef Transformed American Cuisine and Secretly Cooked His Way to Freedom, a biography of Hercules Posey. Fortuitously after the fact, her proposed book was sold to Simon & Schuster’s 37 Ink imprint.     

Kevin McGruder won for his project Rudolph Fisher: Harlem’s Interpreter. Fisher’s concurrent medical and literary careers in the 1920s and 1930s made him a pivotal contributor to the storied intellectual and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.   

Ramin Ganeshram is an award-winning journalist and historian who is currently the Executive Director of the Westport Museum for History & Culture (formerly Westport Historical Society) in Westport, Connecticut. Ganeshram’s area of study is colonial-era American history, particularly focused on enslaved African Americans and mixed-race people. Research for her 2018 novel, The General’s Cook, led Ganeshram to discover the real-life fate of Hercules Posey, the chef enslaved by George Washington, and solving a 218-year-old historical mystery.   

For her work as curator of Westport Museum’s 2018–19 exhibit, “Remembered: The History of African Americans in Westport,” Ganeshram received the prestigious award for Leadership in the Museum Field from the New England Museum Association (NEMA). The exhibit also won awards of merit from the Connecticut League of History Associations (CLHO) and the coveted Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH).   

In 2019, Ganeshram was also awarded the Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship for the Study of Minorities in American Maritime History. She is a 2022/23 Fellow at the Fred W. Smith Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. Ganeshram is currently working on a book about how the Caribbean influenced North American cuisine as part of the Atlantic Trade.   

Kevin McGruder a native of Toledo, Ohio, is an associate professor of History at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He earned a B.A. in Economics from Harvard University in 1979; after moving to New York in 1982, he earned an M.B.A. in Real Estate Finance from Columbia University, and subsequently earned his doctorate in U.S. History at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. In the 1980s and 1990s, he worked in nonprofit community development in Harlem, including as Director of Real Estate Development with the Abyssinian Development Corporation, an affiliate of the famous Abyssinian Baptist Church.   

Over the years McGruder also owned and co-owned two retail shops—Home to Harlem and Harlemade Styleshop, respectively—whose books, products, and social programs particularly celebrated the Harlem Renaissance.

From 2011 to 2012, McGruder was a scholar-in-residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where his doctoral dissertation expanded into the book Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem: 1890 to 1920 (Columbia University Press, 2015). His next book was Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021), a biography of the founder of the Afro-American Realty Company.   

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. 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 Rachel L. Swarns. 

Apply for BIO 2024 Fellowships and Prizes

January 16th, 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.

Apply for BIO 2023 Fellowships and Prizes

January 17th, 2023

BIO encourages all members to review its four fellowships, now accepting applications for 2023. Please share information about the Rollin Fellowship, the Chip Bishop Fellowship, and the Rowley Prize, which are open to nonmembers, with your friends, colleagues, and networks.

Please note that the amounts have increased from $3,000 to $5,000 for both the Rollin Fellowship and Rowley Prize, and the number of recipients has increased from one to two for the Rollin Fellowship and from two to four for the Caro Fellowship. These increased benefits, which BIO will sustain for at least five years, are thanks to gifts from Kitty Kelley and other generous friends of BIO.

• The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship awards $5,000 each to two authors working on a biographical work about an African American figure (or figures), whose story provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience. Applications are due February 1, 2023. More information about the fellowship is available here.
• The Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship awards funding to as many as four authors working on biographical works for research trips to archives or to important settings in their subjects’ lives. The deadline for applications is February 1, 2023. Learn more here.
• The Chip Bishop Fellowship awards $1,000 to one recipient for for travel expenses, including transportation costs and child care, needed to attend the BIO Conference. The deadline for applications is April 1, 2023. Learn more here.
• The Hazel Rowley Prize awards $5,000 to a first-time biographer whose book proposal shows exceptional merit. The deadline for applications is March 1, 2023. Click here for more information.

Kitty Kelley Funds Rollin Fellowship and Hosts Event

July 13th, 2022

Longtime BIO member and BIO Board member Kitty Kelley has donated $50,000 to the organization. The generous donation will fund two annual Rollin Fellowships of $5,000 each for the next five years. The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, given to writers of exceptional biographies in progress about African American subjects, was first awarded in 2021 to Rachel L. Swarns for a multigenerational biography of an enslaved Black family torn apart by the 1838 slave sale that saved Georgetown University from financial ruin. This year, the award was bestowed upon Marion Orr for his proposed biography of former U.S. congressman Charles Diggs Jr. 

The Rollin Fellowship aims to remediate the disproportionate scarcity of, and even suppression of, Black lives and voices in the broad catalog of published biography. This fellowship reflects not only BIO’s commitment to supporting working biographers but to encouraging diversity in the field. Kelley’s donation will enable the amount of the award to increase from $2,000 to $5,000 and will double the number of recipients of the award over the next five years. Of her donation, Kelley said: “By supporting the Rollin Fellowship, I hope to bring in more young and diverse members to BIO. I hope that all Rollin recipients—and everyone who receives a BIO grant or fellowship—will pay it forward by reaching out to their colleagues and classmates.” 

In addition to her personal donation, Kelley has worked diligently with BIO’s Development Committee to raise additional funds for the organization through The Biographer’s Circle, a select group of donors who host fundraising events for BIO in their homes. On May 25, Kelley oversaw the first Biographer’s Circle Event held since the pandemic hit, at the home of Steve Rubin, consulting editor for Simon & Schuster, in Manhattan. The event raised nearly $10,000 for BIO.  

Kathleen Stone, the chair of BIO’s Development Committee, said of the event, “The spirit was warm and welcoming, typical of a BIO event, and it was a successful fundraiser. Kitty Kelley was the moving force behind the event and we owe her tremendous thanks. Thank you, Kitty, for everything from creative conception to flawless execution. We very much appreciate how generously you share your energy and talents with BIO and all of us.”  

Photo by Philip Bermingham

Marion Orr Wins 2022 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship

April 8th, 2022

Photo credit: Ellen Dessloch

Marion Orr is the winner of the 2022 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for his proposed biography of former U.S. Congressman Charles Diggs Jr. Orr’s reintroduction of the consequential, but forgotten legislator impressed the committee.  2022 Frances Rollin Prize Committee chair Eric K. Washington said, “Orr’s lucid prose and keenly paced narrative engaged us through the uneven landscape of American legislative politics towards an ill-fated horizon.”

“Diggs’s illustrious career was marred by personal troubles that eventually ruined him,” Orr says of the subject of his biography, The House of Diggs: The Untold Story of Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr.’s Activist Leadership: From Emmett Till to Anti-Apartheid and the Scandal that Nearly Erased a Social Justice Legacy. The book, which is to be the subject’s first full-length biography, is under contract with University of North Carolina Press. “I have roughly two or three more chapters to write,” Orr says, as he continues to plumb “Diggs’s rarely seen personal papers, original interviews with family members and political associates, FBI documents, and documents gathered from U.S. presidential libraries.”

Marion Orr is the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he once served as director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy (2008–2014). This will be his first biography; his previous books include Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore (University Press of Kansas, 1999), which won the Policy Studies Organization’s Aaron Wildavsky Award for the best policy studies book, and the coauthored book, The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics, and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton University Press, 1999), which won the American Political Science Association’s award for the best book published on urban politics.

The Frances Rollin Fellowship awards $2,000 to an author working on a biographical work about an African American figure (or figures) whose story provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience. This fellowship also includes a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO Conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels. The fellowship advances BIO’s commitment to remediate the disproportionate reflection of Black lives and voices in published biography, and to encouraging diversity in the field.

The fellowship commemorates 19th-century author and activist Frances Anne Rollin Whipper—who wrote under her nickname-turned-pen name “Frank A. Rollin”—whose 1868 biography, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, about a Black abolitionist journalist, physician, and Union Army officer, positioned her among the first recorded African American biographers. The Black press particularly underscored the significance of her precedent and called for more biographies of African Americans, a call which this fellowship, in her honor, seeks to carry on.

The 2022 Frances Rollin Prize Committee members were Eric K. Washington (chair), Tamara Payne, and Adam Henig.

Orr is the second recipient of the Frances Rollin Fellowship, which was established in 2021. He will receive the award during the 2022 BIO Conference on Saturday, May 14.

BIO Honors Award Winners at Conference

June 8th, 2021

As it does every year, BIO recognized the winners of several awards on the first day of its 2021 virtual conference. The presentations and winners’ remarks were prerecorded; winners of all but two of the awards had already been announced. You can see a video of the award presentations here.

Sonja D. Williams

Shepard Service Award
On the video, attendees learned that Sonja D. Williams was the winner of the Ray A. Shepard Service Award, given to honor BIO volunteers whose work goes above and beyond the call of duty. It comes with a statuette and a lifetime membership. The award is named for its initial winner, Ray A. Shepard, who almost single-handedly organized the first BIO Conference in 2010. The award was last given in 2018.

Williams has worked as a broadcast journalist and has won three consecutive George Foster Peabody Awards for Significant and Meritorious Achievement, for writing and producing program segments for groundbreaking documentary series distributed by National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and the Smithsonian Institution. Williams won the Shepard Service Award for her work, along with Lisa Napoli, in producing podcasts for BIO featuring interviews with biographers. Williams said she especially appreciated the award “since it’s named for a fellow biographer and longtime BIO member Ray Shepard.” Williams noted that she served on BIO’s board with Shepard and that he was an early supporter of the podcast.

Jeff Flannery

Biblio Award
The other award winner publicly announced for the first time was Jeff Flannery, who was honored with the Biblio Award. This award recognizes a librarian or archivist who has made an exceptional contribution to the craft of biography. Flannery was the head of the Reference and Reader Services Section in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress (LOC) until his retirement at the end of 2020.

Tim Duggan, a member of BIO’s Awards Committee, introduced biographer A. Scott Berg, whose subjects include Woodrow Wilson and Max Perkins, who recounted his experiences relying on Flannery’s expertise. Berg said that while researching at the LOC, Flannery was “more than an overseer, he became an integral part of my research process.” Flannery assisted several other honored biographers, including BIO Award-winners Candice Millard, James McGrath Morris, and Ron Chernow.

The previously announced winners were Humera Afridi and Iris Jamahl Dunkle for the Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship; Tanya Paperny for the Hazel Rowley Prize; and Rachel L. Swarns for the Frances “Frank” Rollins Fellowship.

Rachel L. Swarns Wins Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship

April 10th, 2021

Rachel L. Swarns is the winner of the 2021 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for her proposal of an as yet untitled, multigenerational biography of an enslaved Black family torn apart by the 1838 slave sale that saved Georgetown University from financial ruin. The committee was impressed by Swarns’s lucid, engaging narrative as she highlighted slavery’s devastating impact on a family fatefully separated when “the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests sold 272 enslaved men, women and children.” Her compelling biography-in-progress is projected for publication by Random House in 2023. “My biography of this African American family will fill critical gaps in our understanding of American history and the legacy of American slavery,” Swarns wrote. She is the fellowship’s inaugural recipient.

Swarns is a journalist, author, and professor, who writes about race and race relations as a contributing writer for The New York Times. She is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, and the author of American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama, published by Amistad/Harper Collins in 2012. The Leon Levy Center for Biography also just awarded Swarns one of  its 2021-2022 Biography Fellowships to work on her same forthcoming book.

The Rollin Fellowship awards $2,000 to an author working on a biographical work about an African American figure or figures whose story provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience. This fellowship also includes a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels. The fellowship advances BIO’s commitment to remediate the disproportionate reflection of Black lives and voices in published biography, and to encouraging diversity in the field.

The fellowship commemorates 19th century author and activist Frances Anne Rollin Whipper—who wrote under her nickname-turned-pen name “Frank A. Rollin”—whose 1868 biography, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, about a Black abolitionist journalist, physician, and Union Army officer, positioned her among the first recorded African American biographers. The Black press particularly underscored the significance of her precedent and called for more biographies of African Americans, a call which this fellowship, in her honor, seeks to carry on.