Kate Medina Receives BIO’s 2025 Editorial Excellence Award

September 15th, 2025

Biographers International Organization (BIO) is pleased to announce that Kate Medina is the 2025 recipient of the Editorial Excellence Award. Established in 2014, this annual award honors an editor for outstanding work in the service of biography and literature. Medina will be presented with the award on Tuesday, October 7, at the New York Society Library in New York. Among the scheduled speakers will be Jonathan Darman, Andrea Elliott, Jon Meacham, and Evan Thomas.

“The BIO Awards Committee is honored to present this year’s Editorial Excellence Award to Kate Medina, who recently retired from her position as Executive Vice President, Associate Publisher, and Executive Editorial Director at Random House,” says Committee Chair Heather Clark. “There, she edited Isabel Wilkerson, Jon Meacham, Gloria Steinem, Sandra Day O’Connor, Katherine Boo, Tom Brokaw, E. L. Doctorow, Emma Cline, Anna Quindlen, and Tracy Kidder, among many others.” Biographer Jon Meacham adds, “Henry James might well have had Kate in mind when he wrote that we should all strive to be someone on whom nothing is lost.”

According to Publishers Weekly, “Medina began her career in publishing at Doubleday, where she worked on the manuscript of Peter Benchley’s debut novel, Jaws, and acquired and edited Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs.” In 1985, Medina joined Random House, where she rose to become Executive Vice President, Associate Publisher, and Executive Editorial Director.  Among the other authors she has worked with are John Dickerson, Jane Fonda, Tressie McMillan Cottom, David Finkel, Margaret MacMillan, Sally Bedell Smith, and Brenda Wineapple.

The Editorial Excellence Award program is scheduled from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM at the New York Society Library, 53 E. 79^th Street. The event is free, but seating is limited and registration is required. Register HERE. Authors Jonathan Darman, Andrea Elliott, Jon Meacham, and Evan Thomas will join Kate Medina in a discussion of Life Choices: The Art of Choosing the Subject for a Book: Writers, Editors, and the Biographical Journey.

Jonathan Darman is a journalist and historian who writes about American politics and the presidency. His books include Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis that Made a President and Landslide: Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America, which tells the story of a thousand transformative days in the 1960s through the eyes of two iconic American presidents. As a former national political correspondent for Newsweek, Jonathan covered the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mitt Romney. He wrote extensively about other significant figures in national politics and the media.

Andrea Elliott is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, and the author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and was chosen by President Barack Obama as a favorite book of the year. Elliott is also the recipient of a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, a George Polk Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, Columbia University’s Medal for Excellence, and other honors. She is the first woman to win individual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism and Arts & Letters.

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power; American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House; Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship; Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush; and His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, he holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University and is a fellow of the Society of American Historians.

Evan Thomas is the author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestsellers First: Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, and Being Nixon. His latest book, Road to Surrender, is an account of the dramatic final days of World War II, when Japan was reeling but would not accept defeat.  Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years as Washington bureau chief at Newsweek.   He has appeared on numerous TV shows, including Meet the Press, CBS Morning News, Morning Joe, and The Colbert Report.  Thomas has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton, where, from 2007 to 2014, he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism.

BIO’s Editorial Excellence Award has been presented since 2014. Past recipients are Michael Korda, Bob Bender, Tim Duggan, Robert Gottlieb, Gerald Howard, Gayatri Patnaik, Jonathan Segal, Ileene Smith, Nan A. Talese, and Robert Weil.

For further information regarding the Editorial Excellence Award and to schedule an interview with the Awards Committee Chair, Heather Clark, please contact BIO President, Steve Paul at president@biographersinternational.org.

Call for 2026 BIO Conference Proposals

September 4th, 2025

The 2026 BIO Conference is tentatively scheduled for May 28–29 in New York City, and the Conference Committee—co-chaired by Jared Stearns—invites members to submit panel proposals for consideration.

The Committee welcomes proposals in three broad categories:

• Basics – guidance for beginning biographers
• Craft – exploring the art and technique of biography
• Issues, Business, Publishing & Innovations – topics of broad professional interest

The conference theme will be announced soon; however, proposals on any relevant topics are encouraged. For inspiration, you may wish to review programs from past BIO Conferences.

To submit a proposal, please fill out this Google Form with the following:

• A panel title
• Your name and contact information
• A description of the panel (100–150 words)
• A list of potential panelists and a moderator (panelists should be published biographers or recognized experts, and the group should reflect a diversity of voices; preliminary names only are fine)

Please note: not all proposals will be accepted. The Program Committee may modify selected proposals to create a balanced and engaging conference.

Important dates:

• Proposal deadline: October 1, 2025
• Notification of decisions by: December 1, 2025

Panelists and moderators will receive complimentary registration for the conference. Travel and lodging expenses, however, are not covered.

Questions? Please contact Jared Stearns.

Thank you for helping us shape another dynamic BIO Conference—we look forward to your ideas!

Valerie Waterhouse Wins Inaugural Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship

June 30th, 2025

Valerie Waterhouse has been named the recipient of the inaugural Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship for her research on Malachi Whitaker (1895–1976), a British working-class writer known for her short stories and memoir.

The $25,000 fellowship is awarded to a doctoral student in any department who is writing a dissertation in English that focuses on the life of another person or persons. It is endowed by Kitty Kelley, a founding member of BIO, the author of seven best-selling biographies, and a long-time advocate for biography and biographers.

“Being chosen by a committee of published biographers as the inaugural winner of the Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship is a game-changer for me,” said Waterhouse. “Writing the first biography of any subject involves long, isolated hours in archives, libraries, on research trips, and in one’s own head.  This prestigious affirmation gives me the confidence and support I need to continue and complete my work. Malachi Whitaker was a literary author writing stories about northern working-class people at the time of Virginia Woolf’s upper-class Bloomsbury.  Her work fills a gap in English literary history. Thank you, Kitty Kelley, and BIO, for helping to bring attention to  her life and work.”

“The fellowship selection committee was pleased with the pool of applicants for its inaugural fellowship and was doubly pleased to find within that pool a true biography, one that makes the case for reconsidering an overlooked woman writer,” said Linda Leavell, chair of the committee. “Valerie Waterhouse’s writing sample shows that she has learned well the art of creating narrative out of serious scholarship. We congratulate Ms. Waterhouse on her promising project and also the University of Salford for accepting biography as a creative writing dissertation.”

The selection committee was composed of Linda Leavell, Heather Clark, and Carla Kaplan.

Liz Schott Wins the 2025 Hazel Rowley Prize

June 28th, 2025

The 2025 Hazel Rowley Prize, honoring the best book proposal by a first-time biographer, has been awarded to Liz Schott, who is working on a biography of Dorothy Wright Liebes. Liebes was renowned for textile design, color artistry, and experimentation with innovative fibers from the mid-1930s until her death in 1972. She dominated women’s magazines, was featured in newsreels, television, and radio programs, and created the “Liebes Look,” a modern aesthetic we still embrace without even knowing her name.

Liebes was a woman ahead of her time, but also very much of her time. She separated from her first husband to establish her business, but remained married to and supported by him for over a decade. She consulted with Dupont in the 1960s and pioneered fabrics for space exploration, yet she identified herself as a “housewife” on travel manifests rather than as the powerful businesswoman she was. In Useful and Beautiful: The Life of Dorothy Wright Liebes, Schott will tackle these contradictions to unveil a life story that has gone untold for too long.

Nigel Hamilton and Paula Tarnapol Whitacre served on the committee.

Mary Chapman and Rebecca Roberts Named 2025 Caro Fellowship Recipients

June 26th, 2025

Mary Chapman (Photo: Paul Joseph)

Rebecca Roberts

Mary Chapman and Rebecca Roberts are the winners of the 2025 Robert and Ina Caro Travel Fellowships for travel. They will receive $5,000 each for research trips to archives or other significant locations in their subjects’ lives.

Chapman is writing Go-Away Girls: How an Enslaved Chinese Child Acrobat Inspired Her Daughter, Sui Sin Far, and Asian American Literature, a dual biography of Edith Eaton and her mother, which sheds light on their pioneering strategies for survival and success.

Roberts is writing a book about Rose Cleveland, sister of Grover Cleveland, teacher, writer, lecturer, women’s rights activist, acting First Lady from 1885-1886,  and, most remarkably perhaps, “America’s first gay First Lady.”   

The 2025 Caro Travel Fellowship Committee members were Carla Kaplan (chair), Marc Leepson, and Susan Page. 

BIO Announces Two Winners for the 2025 Plutarch Award

June 6th, 2025

Biographers International Organization (BIO) announced today that two books would share its 2025 Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2024. The winners are Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Harper). The Plutarch is the only international prize of its kind as it’s selected by a committee of five distinguished biographers, chaired this year by Ruth Franklin. The prestigious award comes with a $3,000 honorarium, which will be equally divided between the two winners.

“As works of biography, these books are so different that they are almost impossible to compare,” said 2025 Plutarch Award Committee Chair Ruth Franklin. “We thought it was worth acknowledging both: Scapegoat for its innovative structure and engaging, intelligent style; and Candy Darling for its emotional pull and sensitive handling of its subject.” BIO President Steve Paul added, “The pool of Plutarch finalists reflects what feels like a bountiful period for biography in general. I commend our panel of judges for breaking precedent and highlighting two wildly different but highly engaging life stories.”

“Shaved her legs and then he was a she,” Lou Reed sang in “Walk on the Wild Side,” his song about Candy Darling and other New York City counterculture icons of the 1960s and 1970s. As Carr demonstrates in this haunting and deeply sympathetic portrait, it wasn’t anywhere near that easy. From Candy’s years growing up in Long Island—as a child who “looked like a girl dressed in boy’s clothing,” she was abused by her father as well as her peers—and continuing through her glamorous yet down-and-out twenties, when she was crashing in friends’ spare rooms even as Andy Warhol made her one of his “superstars,” her life was marked by discrimination, poverty, and physical trauma, which culminated in hormone treatments that likely contributed to her tragic death from stomach cancer at age twenty-nine. Working with archival interviews done by a close friend of Candy’s as well as her own detailed research, Carr insists on her subject’s individuality even as Candy comes to represent something larger: the immense bravery of living as a transgender person at a time when it was illegal for men even to wear women’s clothing in public.

With a novelist’s eye for the extraordinary, Hughes-Hallett conjures an entire bygone world: the masques, dances, art, food, and attitudes towards “effeminacy,” among other curious subjects, of Jacobean era England. At the center of it all is George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, who rose from humble beginnings to become the favorite—and lover—of King James I, as well as (in the words of his unreliable detractors) “a devil, a spotted monster, a comet that disrupted the natural order.” Hughes-Hallett sketches Villiers with obvious sympathy, and her portrait is stylish, vivid, and frequently surprising. This biography combines sexual politics with passages on warfare and Westminster, resulting in an engagingly modern take on a dramatic period of history.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett responded to news of her win, saying, “I’m thrilled that my book and I are joining the illustrious list of past winners of this prize, and I love the prize for its name. I learnt from him how flexible biographers must be. How we have to find strategies to deal with sources that contradict each other or deliberately mislead. I learnt from him the thrill of inventing forms that could make a Life feel life-like. I got the message that a biographer is first and foremost a teller of stories.”

Hughes-Hallett also congratulated her co-winner, Cynthia Carr, “Our subjects are separated by centuries, but I like it that they both set up challenges to repressive sexual orthodoxy. Both basked in celebrity, and suffered for it. Some stories never get old.”

Cynthia Carr said of her win, “I especially appreciate this recognition given that Candy Darling was a transgender icon, and we now have a federal government telling us that trans people do not exist – and have no rights. I began my work on this in 2013. It wasn’t easy. Candy never even had a place to live and research material was scattered. But I decided to write the book after learning about the huge gulf between her glamorous image and the realities of her life.  I can also assure you that Candy Darling was never political, but she knew who she was.”

Cynthia Carr (New York) is the author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize; Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America; and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Candy Darling won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was featured as a best book of the year by The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, and NBC New York.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett (London) is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year, the Costa Biography Award, and was chosen by The Sunday Times as the biography of the decade. Her other books include the novel Peculiar Ground; Fabulous, a collection of short stories; and the cultural histories Cleopatra and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Her biography, Scapegoat, was the winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction and received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews.

The 2024 Plutarch Committee consisted of five esteemed biographers: Ruth Franklin (Chair), Vanda Krefft, David Maraniss, Lisa Napoli, and Lance Richardson. Together they considered over 150 titles   from the US and UK. The top ten biographies were announced in March 2025 and from those were chosen the five finalists, announced in April.

Information about the three other finalists is available here. Learn more about the longlist titles here.

2025 Plutarch Award Shortlist Announced

April 22nd, 2025

A distinguished panel of judges from the Biographers International Organization (BIO) is proud to announce the five books shortlisted for the 2025 Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. These five biographies uphold the high standard set by earlier Plutarch winners for the quality of research, the literary merit of the writing, and the originality and significance of the project.

This year’s five shortlisted titles and detailed information are listed below in alphabetical order by author’s name. Information about the longlist titles is available here.

Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr
“Shaved her legs and then he was a she,” Lou Reed sang in “Walk on the Wild Side,” his song about Candy Darling and other New York City counterculture icons of the 1960s and 1970s. As Carr demonstrates in this haunting and deeply sympathetic portrait, it wasn’t anywhere near that easy. From Candy’s years growing up in Long Island—as a child who “looked like a girl dressed in boy’s clothing,” she was abused by her father as well as her peers—and continuing through her glamorous yet down-and-out twenties, when she was crashing in friends’ spare rooms even as Andy Warhol made her one of his “superstars,” her life was marked by discrimination, poverty, and physical trauma, which culminated in hormone treatments that likely contributed to her tragic death from stomach cancer at age twenty-nine. Working with archival interviews done by a close friend of Candy’s as well as her own detailed research, Carr insists on her subject’s individuality even as Candy comes to represent something larger: the immense bravery of living as a transgender person at a time when it was illegal for men even to wear women’s clothing in public. 

The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America by Stephanie Gorton
Deeply researched, engagingly written, and with urgent timeliness, The Icon and the Idealist explores the shared goals and contentious rivalry of the two very different women who led the fight for female reproductive freedom in the United States. On the one hand, the icon: radical, attractive, and flamboyant Margaret Sanger, a former New York City slum nurse who founded the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn and later Planned Parenthood. On the other, the idealist: plain-looking, college-educated Mary Ware Dennett, who, after getting ditched for another woman by her architect husband, left New England for bohemian life in New York City. Initially friends and allies, both Sanger and Dennett believed that a woman’s freedom depended on her ability to control childbearing. They clashed, bitterly, over strategy. Gorton deftly avoids the trap of a right/wrong dichotomy and instead portrays the nuanced, flawed humanity and heroic strengths of each reformer.

John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg
Greenberg succeeds admirably in breaking through the encrusted story of an icon to reveal the figure beneath the myths. The John Lewis brought to life in this meticulously reported work overcomes not only the brutal racism of the Jim Crow South but his own doubts and vulnerabilities as he moves through the stations of the cross of the 1960s civil rights movement and on to an astonishing second act as the “conscience of Congress” during seventeen terms in Washington. This is a classic, straightforward biography, and the depth of Greenberg’s research shines through, illuminating the importance of John Lewis through hundreds of interviews, archival documents, FBI files, and most of all the empathetic but honest sensibility of the author. 

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
With a novelist’s eye for the extraordinary, Hughes-Hallett conjures an entire bygone world: the masques, dances, art, food, and attitudes towards “effeminacy,” among other curious subjects, of Jacobean era England. At the center of it all is George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, who rose from humble beginnings to become the favorite—and lover—of King James I, as well as (in the words of his unreliable detractors) “a devil, a spotted monster, a comet that disrupted the natural order.” Hughes-Hallett sketches Villiers with obvious sympathy, and her portrait is stylish, vivid, and frequently surprising. This biography mixes sexual politics with passages on warfare and Westminster, making for an engagingly modern take on a dramatic period of history. 

The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
Long after the death in 1961 of thirty-six-year-old psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, his theories of decolonization have shaped contemporary revolutions while fascinating and polarizing intellectuals and artists around the world. Biographer Adam Shatz has parlayed his lifelong interest in this “thinker of global significance” into a compelling biography of Fanon’s journey from Martinique to France and finally Algiers—a book that, as Shatz writes, is deeply tuned into the “gaps, silences, tensions, and contradictions” of this “nomad who never stopped looking for a home.”

The winner of the 2025 Plutarch Award for the Best Biographer of 2024 will be announced on Friday, June 6, at the annual BIO Conference in Washington, D.C. Information about the conference can be found here.

2025 Plutarch Award Longlist Announced

February 25th, 2025

The 2025 Plutarch Award longlist has been decided. This year’s award committee consists of BIO members Ruth Franklin (chair), Vanda Krefft, Lance Richardson, David Maraniss, and Lisa Napoli.

“The 2025 Plutarch Committee reviewed close to 150 books by first-time and experienced biographers, issued by major presses and small academic publishers, on subjects who made their lives in worlds as different as ancient Rome and modern-day Hollywood,” says Franklin. “Many took the traditional cradle-to-grave approach; a few left us debating whether they should even be called biographies. According to the standards set by earlier committees, we looked for a balance of rigorous research, irresistible writing, and original ideas. Some of these books have already appeared on many other ‘top ten’ and ‘best of’ lists; we’re excited to bring attention to others that will likely be new to you. All of them opened up new worlds to us or offered new perspectives on the familiar.”

The titles, listed in alphabetical order by authors’ last names, are as follows:

Max Boot, Reagan: His Life and Legend (Liveright)

Political columnist Max Boot interviewed over 100 of Reagan’s aides, friends, and family members, and researched thousands of newly available documents to write what critics call “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date.” Boot contextualizes Reagan’s life and provides a nuanced look at the 40th president.

Cynthia Carr, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Cynthia Carr puts Candy Darling, a transgender icon and Warhol film star, back into the spotlight in this meticulously researched biography. Candy Darling died at the young age of 29, in 1974, a time in which conversations about gender identity were just beginning.

Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss (Random House)

Fredericka Mandelbaum’s rise from tenement poverty to vast wealth in Gilded Age New York City was not a simple rags-to-riches tale. Margalit Fox’s well-researched and flamboyantly told biography captures the fascinating story of a woman who rose through the ranks of New York City society by becoming a criminal mastermind.

Stephanie Gorton, The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America (HarperCollins)

Stephanie Gorton provides a richly researched and bold perspective on the clash between two women—Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett—whose activism led the way to the modern discourse over women’s reproductive freedoms. Gorton weaves details of how race, class, and gender, as well as the Great Depression and the eugenics agenda impacted the fight for bodily autonomy and access to birth control into this portrait of rivals whose work affected generations to come.

David Greenberg, John Lewis: A Life (Simon & Schuster)

Most people know of John Lewis’s work in the civil rights movement, but David Greenberg’s biography goes beyond this, covering Lewis’s rise into politics, his work as a voting rights activist, and his dedication to nonviolence and justice. Greenberg uses sources ranging from archives to interviews with almost 300 people, as well as footage of Lewis speaking from his hospital bed in Selma to create a fully dimensional picture of this icon of civil rights and freedom.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival Is A Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Macmillan)

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the first researcher to fully explore the depths of Audre Lorde’s manuscript archives. As a result, she has written a biography that captures Lorde’s teachings, creativity, resilience, and her deep engagement with the planet itself in a way that does justice to this force of poetic nature.

Lucy Hughes-Hallet, The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham (Harper)

In a biography that reads much like a novel, Lucy Hughes-Hallet explores the world of the Duke of Buckingham, James I’s confidant, advisor, and lover, and the dynamic world of early modern England.

Heath Hardage Lee, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady (Macmillan)

Heath Hardage Lee shows the elusive Pat Nixon as few have seen her. While the press portrayed this First Lady as elusive and “plastic,” Nixon did important work for humanitarianism, equal rights, and political policy. This biography portrays a woman that deserved her accolade as the “Most Admired Woman in the World.”

Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Macmillan)

This is the thrilling story of Frantz Fanon, the intellectual activist who wrote revolutionary works about race and the psychology of power. His work challenged white supremacy and racial capitalism and still resonates today.

Jackie Wullschläger, Monet: The Restless Vision (Penguin Random House)

Drawing on thousands of letters and unpublished resources, Jackie Wullschläger reveals a new perspective on the life of one of the most important painters of the 19th century, Claude Monet. The author shows how his tumultuous love life impacted his painting and gives readers a new understanding of Monet’s work as well as his life.

The winner will be announced during the 2025 BIO Conference, occurring June 5 and 6 at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C.