BIO Member Amanda Vaill Wins 2026 Pulitzer for Biography
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 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.
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The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University will host Three Conversations on Contemporary Biography on Friday, October 10, 2025, from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The symposium, presented in partnership with Yale Public Humanities, will feature leading voices in the field—including BIO Vice President Heather Clark—alongside Farah Jasmine Griffin, Robin D. G. Kelley, Nathan Kernan, Eileen Myles, and BIO member Francesca Wade.