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

August 27th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call for Proposals: 2027 BIO Conference

August 10th, 2026

BIO has opened the call for proposals for its 2027 conference, set for Thursday, June 17, 2027 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, possibly with some events Wednesday, June 16. Proposals are due September 30, 2026.

This Year’s Theme: “Biographical Worlds”

This year’s program theme invites participants to think widely and deeply about the creative work biographers do. Attendee‑organized panel topics could include:

• • Building biographical worlds in traditional biographies and in film, podcasts, or other non‑text formats
  • International and non‑US biographical subjects
  • US subjects in global spaces
  • Seeing America from afar
  • Engaging global archives
  • Experiments with scale, proximity, and intimacy
  • Global imagination, local audience
  • Engaging wide readerships

Program Committee co‑chairs Karin Roffman and Mary Chapman invite BIO members to submit proposals for panels, which the Program Committee will review for possible inclusion in the 2027 program.

Panel Categories

The Program Committee seeks proposals for up to 16 one‑hour panels, each featuring three to four speakers, in the following categories:

1. FUNDAMENTALS: the fundamental aspects of starting a new biography with which everyone from beginners to seasoned biographers continues to wrestle
2. CRAFT: the art of making a biography work
3. BUSINESS: the business of biography, including responses from agents, editors, and others
4. ISSUES AND INNOVATIONS: issues of interest to a broad range of biographers

The Program Committee also welcomes proposals for programming in non‑traditional formats.

Formats to Consider

Please refer to the programs of past conferences to see the range of formats a “panel” could take, including a roundtable, a series of presentations, or a conversation between the moderator and the panelists with time for Q&A. Below are links to videos of recent panels that were well received by BIO attendees:

• “Experimenting With Form”
• “How 1776 Speaks to Us Today”
• “Narrative Uses of Perspective and Voice”

How to Submit

Your proposal should be a Word document or PDF labeled with the TYPE of panel you are proposing, followed by the SURNAME of the panel organizer (for example, “CRAFT LASTNAME”). It should include:

• Panel title
• Organizer’s name and contact information (the organizer can serve as either a panelist or a moderator, but must be part of the panel)
• A description of the panel, about 100 to 150 words
• Names, contact information, and brief biographies for three or four confirmed panelists, including one moderator. Ideally, panelists should be published biographers (or authors of biographies with an announced publication date) or experts in their field, and together should represent a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds.

Please submit your proposal as an attachment to an email with the subject line BIO PANEL PROPOSAL to both co‑chairs:

• mary.chapman@ubc.ca
• karin.roffman@gmail.com

Deadline: September 30, 2026

There is no guarantee of acceptance of any proposal, and accepted proposals are subject to modification by the Program Committee to create a balanced conference. The committee will notify authors of proposals no later than December 1. Presenters will receive a discount on conference registration.

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

May 29th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIO Member Amanda Vaill Wins 2026 Pulitzer for Biography

May 8th, 2026

BIO member Amanda Vaill has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the Pulitzer Prize Board announced May 4. The judges called it “a lively and detailed biography of two daughters of wealthy and influential Dutch landowners who colored our nation’s history,” praising Vaill’s use of the present tense to tell the sisters’ story while drawing on the past tense to chronicle the sweep of the American Revolution.

The book recasts Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, daughters of colonial Hudson Valley aristocracy long overshadowed by the men in their lives, as women “as formidable as, and in some respects stronger than, the men they loved, married, and mothered.”

Also recognized was BIO member Lance Richardson, named a finalist for True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen (Pantheon). The judges praised it as “the life of a talented, complicated writer who rejected conformity and whose experiences informed the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of his work.” The book is the first biography of Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi whose work championed Native American rights and helped usher in the modern environmental movement.

The third finalist was James McWilliams for The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford (University of Arkansas Press).

This year’s jury was chaired by Marie Arana, Literary Director for the Library of Congress. Jurors included BIO members Jonathan Eig, who won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and Amy Reading; Joseph Crespino, Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences and Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University; and Christopher McAuley, Professor Emeritus of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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

April 24th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

2026 Plutarch Award Shortlist Announced

April 16th, 2026

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

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

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

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

2026 Plutarch Award Longlist Announced

March 17th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

Register Now for Biography Lab 2026

December 18th, 2025

You can now register for Biography Lab 2026, BIO’s fourth annual online forum, which will take place via Zoom on Saturday, January 24, 2026. This event brings together biographers and publishing professionals for in-depth discussions on the craft and challenges of biography. It welcomes participants of all levels. 

Register here. The event is free for BIO members and $60 for nonmembers. (The nonmember admission fee includes a one-year BIO membership.)

The plenary speaker will be David Denby, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (Henry Holt & Company, 2025). Denby will explore the research and narrative strategies behind writing an unconventional group biography.

The program also features forums led by Brian Jay Jones, Dr. Ashley D. Farmer, and Susan Page, with sessions on creative lives, biographical work without traditional archives, and the uncovering of surprise connections in the lives of prominent women. 

Full schedule details and additional information are available on the event page.