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.

Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship Deadline February 15

February 7th, 2025

Photo by Philip Bermingham

The deadline to apply for the Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship in Biography is Saturday, February 15, 2025. The fellowship, endowed by Kitty Kelley, founding member of BIO and long-time advocate for biography and biographers, provides $25,000 to a doctoral student writing a dissertation in English focused on another person’s life or the lives of two or more individuals.

The winner of the scholarship will be announced no later than May 1, 2025. The request for applications is now open. Please visit this link for more information about the award and how to apply. The official entry form can be found here.

Kelley is the bestselling author of multiple biographical works where she has displayed courage and deftness in writing unvarnished accounts of some of the most influential figures in politics, media, and popular culture, including Oprah Winfrey, the Bush Family, the Royal Family, Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. 

BIO Welcomes New President, Board Members

June 10th, 2023

BIO’s new President and Board members (from left to right): Steve Paul, Susan Page, Tamara Payne, and Barbara Lehman Smith.

On May 22, following the 2023 BIO conference, Steve Paul became the new president of BIO, succeeding Linda Leavell, who had served two terms in office. (Leavell’s presidency, which brought many beneficial changes to BIO, will be explored in a future edition of The Biographers Craft.) Paul is the author of biographies of Ernest Hemingway and Evan S. Connell. The latter won the 2022 Society of Midland Authors Award for “best biography or memoir.” He’s currently working on the life and poetry of William Stafford (1914–1993). Steve joined BIO in 2016 after a long newspaper career. A BIO Board member since 2020, he has served as BIO’s secretary, been on committees for the Caro fellowship, Rowley prize, and online events, and co-chaired the Program Committee for the 2023 BIO Conference. The facilitator of BIO’s biweekly Zoom roundtable on literary biography, he’s also a former board member and officer of the National Book Critics Circle.

BIO Board member Kathleen Stone has become BIO’s secretary. Additionally, three new members have joined the board of directors: Susan Page, Tamara Payne, and Barbara Lehman Smith. Their bios follow.

Susan Page is the Washington Bureau chief of USA Today. She is the author of Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power and The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, both New York Times bestsellers. She is finishing a biography of Barbara Walters, to be published by Simon & Schuster. Susan has covered 11 presidential elections, interviewed the past 10 presidents, and reported from six continents. She has won every journalism award given specifically for coverage of the presidency and has served as president of the White House Correspondents Association. In 2020, she moderated the vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. A native of Wichita, Kansas, she received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and a master’s degree from Columbia University. She and her husband, Carl Leubsdorf, have two sons, Ben and Will.

Tamara Payne is the co-author of The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, written with her father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Les Payne. In 1991, she joined Les Payne on this project, as the principal researcher. After Les Payne’s sudden passing in 2018, Tamara made it her purpose to finish his life’s work (the Malcom X project). The Dead Are Arising has won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award. Since joining Biographers International Organization, Tamara has served on the Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship Committee and the Plutarch Committee.

An active member of BIO since 2010, Barbara Lehman Smith currently serves on the Development Committee and formerly served on the Plutarch Committee (2013–2015). She is the author of Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones: The Artist Who Lived Twice, a biography of the 20th-century painter, and has written for various publications including Fine Art Connoisseur, Pennsylvania Heritage, Johns Hopkins, and TriAthlete magazines, as well as for The Baltimore Sun. As adjunct faculty for Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, she also taught a writing and graphic design class for eight years. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Members of the Board of Directors serve two-year terms. A complete list of the current members of BIO’s Board of Directors can be found here.