Morgan Voeltz Swanson Wins Mayborn Fellowship

August 9th, 2019

Morgan Voeltz Swanson won the Biography Fellowship awarded annually at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, held in July at the University of North Texas. The fellowship is cosponsored by BIO and BIO co-founder James McGrath Morris. With her fellowship, Swanson receives a two- to three-week residency in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and mentoring from Morris during her stay. In addition, she will receive complimentary admission to the 2020 BIO Conference and a $500 stipend.

During her stay in New Mexico, Swanson, a BIO member, will be working on To the Edge of Endurance: American Soldier Henry W. Lawton, Apache Leader Geronimo, and a Manhunt Through the Desert. Her previous writings include journal articles about Lawton and his wife, Mamie.

In 2020, the fellowship will be relaunched as the Mayborn/BIO Hidden Figure Fellowship, intended to assist aspiring authors working on books about figures who merit a biography through their actions rather than fame. “The marketplace is a cruel arbiter of who is deserving of a biography, reflecting our worse biases,” said Morris. “The publishing industry will eagerly commission yet another biography of Washington, Lincoln, or Roosevelt rather than a biography of someone we don’t know but ought to know. The lives and voices of the lesser known need to have their day on the bookshelf.”

The change in focus for the fellowship began following Morris’s address to the 2019 BIO Conference, where he received this year’s BIO Award. “This issue has implications far beyond a writer’s personal writing ambitions,” Morris said at the conference. “It bolsters a leader-centric view of history. In this manner wars are won by generals, economic crises solved by presidents, and industries built by moguls. In turn this elevation of leaders creates historically inaccurate expectations.”

The fellowship provides for a grant of $1,000, a two-week stay in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a casita at the historic Acequia Madre House in cooperation with the Women’s International Studies Center (WISC), dinner five nights a week in the home of James McGrath Morris and Patty Morris, a public reading, and a meeting with an agent. Time will also be set aside for consultation with biographer Morris regarding research and writing techniques for a book on a hidden figure. Morris is the author, among other books, of The New York Times bestselling Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press, which was awarded the Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize, given annually for the best book in Civil Rights History.

Video Highlights from the 2019 BIO Conference

July 18th, 2019

Here are some highlights from the 2019 BIO Conference, held in New York City on May 17-19. You can see the morning plenary with David Remnick, Stacy Schiff, and Judith Thurman, and Nigel Hamilton introducing 2019 BIO Award winner James McGrath Morris, who gave the keynote speech.

BIO Announces Winners of Caro Fellowships

March 8th, 2019

Amy Reading and Nicholas Boggs are this year’s winners of the Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowships. The $2,500 fellowships  are available, on a competitive basis, to BIO members with a work in progress to help fund research trips to archives and to important settings in their subject’s lives. Reading’s book is Katharine White Edits ‘The New Yorker,’ and Boggs is working on James Baldwin: In the Full Light.

Caro Fellowship Committee chair Deirdre David said, “The committee was very impressed by Amy Reading’s detailed exposition of the cultural importance of Katherine White, and by her justification of the need to travel to Maine to explore its significance in her life. We were also engaged by her emphasis on White’s influence in publishing a distinctive list of women writers whose careers, as she put it, ‘were made at The New Yorker.’”

The committee “was also impressed by Nicholas Boggs’ compelling exploration of James Baldwin’s relationships and by his justification of the need to travel to France where Baldwin spent six months in 1956,” said Caroline Fraser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who also served on the committee, along with BIO’s treasurer, Marc Leepson.

Reading and Boggs will receive their stipends on Friday, May 17, at the evening reception preceding the annual BIO Conference in New York City. The reception will be held at the Fabbri Mansion on the Upper East Side. Robert Caro is expected to present the award.

Go here to learn more about the Caro Research/Travel Fellowship.

Listen Up! BIO Has a Podcast

March 1st, 2019

Hear what biographers have to say about their work in BIO’s new, weekly podcast. You can find out more about the podcast and listen to an interview with James Atlas, author of The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, here.

The Plutarch Award Finalists for 2019

February 14th, 2019

Here are the four finalists for the 2019 Plutarch Award, honoring the best biography published in 2018, listed in alphabetical order by author:

2019 Plutarch Jury members:

Megan Marshall, chair; Peniel E. Joseph, Susan Quinn, Will Swift, Amanda Vaill

James McGrath Morris Wins 2019 BIO Award

February 7th, 2019

Among his other responsibilities, James McGrath Morris hosts the winner of the annual Mayborn/BIO Fellowship.

BIO co-founder James McGrath Morris, a writer, a teacher, and a mentor to other biographers, is the winner of the 10th annual BIO Award. BIO bestows this honor on a colleague who has made a major contribution to the advancement of the art and craft of biography. Previous award winners are Jean Strouse, Robert Caro, Arnold Rampersad, Ron Chernow, Stacy Schiff, Taylor Branch, Claire Tomalin, Candice Millard, and Richard Holmes. Morris will receive the honor on May 18, at the 2019 BIO Conference at the Graduate City University of New York, where he will deliver the keynote address.

Morris told The Biographer’s Craft that he first fell in love with biography as a child reading newspaper obituaries. In fact, he said, his steady diet of them became an important part of his education in history. In 2005, after a career as a journalist, editor, book publisher, and school teacher, Morris began writing books full time.

Among his works are Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars; The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism; Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power;Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press (awarded the 2015 Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize for the best work in civil rights history); and The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War. He is also the author of two Amazon Kindle Singles: The Radio Operator and Murder by Revolution.

He taught literary journalism at Texas A&M in 2016, and has also conducted writing workshops at various colleges, universities, and conferences. Morris is currently working on a biography of Tony Hillerman, the late author of ground-breaking mysteries set in the Navajo Nation. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Plutarch Award Longlist for 2019

January 11th, 2019

Here are the nominees for the 2019 Plutarch Award, honoring the best biography published in 2018, listed in alphabetical order by author:

Commended Books

In a year when an abundance of fine biographies went to press, the 2019 Plutarch Award Jury would also like to honor the following eight works:

An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell, Oxford University Press

Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen L. Carter, Henry Holt

Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery, Little, Brown

De Gaulle by Julian Jackson, Harvard University Press

American Eden: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the New Republic by Victoria Johnson, Liveright

The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century by Mark Lamster, Little, Brown

I Am Dynamite: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux, Tim Duggan Books

Reagan: An American Journey by Bob Spitz, Penguin Press

2019 Plutarch Jury members:

Megan Marshall, chair; Peniel E. Joseph, Susan Quinn, Will Swift, Amanda Vaill

Mayborn/BIO Fellowship Winner Hones Her Work

December 15th, 2018

Alison Owings knew she wanted to write about homelessness, but she wasn’t sure how to approach the topic. Then, on a walking tour of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin neighborhood, she met Del Seymour, an elderly African American man leading a group of curious whites through the streets he knew so well. After all, he had earned the unofficial title of “the mayor of the Tenderloin.”

As he recounted some of his experiences as a homeless man in the neighborhood, Seymour said, “I could have gotten a Ph.D. in sidewalks”—and Owings knew she had the focus for her book. She would make Seymour a “micro example of the macro American scourge of homelessness.”

Owings talked about her subject and the biography-in-progress of his life at a reading marking the end of her residency in Tesuque, New Mexico, where she had spent several weeks working on the book as the ninth winner of the Mayborn/BIO Fellowship in Biography. Her host and mentor for her time in New Mexico was BIO co-founder James McGrath Morris, who also hosted Owing’s reading in his home.

Owings had previously written four books, but her book on Seymour is her first biography. Its working title is The Book of Del: Scenes from a Life Before, During, and After Homelessness. Owing began interviewing Seymour, now 71, in late 2015, and she also talked to about 15 people who had crossed his path in the Tenderloin—including his former crack dealer.

Seymour, a Vietnam War veteran who served as a medic and later became a successful contractor and engineer, found himself on the streets during his 18-year addiction to crack cocaine. During that time, he was a self-described hustler—acting as a go-between for other homeless people in myriad situations, legal and otherwise, and always for a fee. For a time, he was also a pimp.

Now clean and living in his own place, Seymour helps run Code Tenderloin, an organization he founded in 2015 to help provide education and ultimately jobs for people in his neighborhood. He also speaks frequently about homelessness to church and civic groups, and he shared his views on the “scourge” at the White House with the Obama administration.

While Seymour has been a cooperative subject, he is often fuzzy on dates and jumps around in his chronology. Owings has decided to present her material in impressionistic scenes. Right now, she envisions somewhere between 50 and 100 of these vignettes that show Seymour’s background, his descent into addiction and life on the street, and the positive path his life has taken since kicking crack.

Owings said the Mayborn/BIO Fellowship has given her what every writer craves: “uninterrupted time.” She has also received Morris’s help in structuring and condensing her writing. That included printing out her interview transcripts, which totaled two reams of paper. At the reading, Morris noted that Seymour’s domination of the research material and non-chronological presentation posed a particular challenge for Owings: “Organizing that so she can write a narrative is very hard.”

Another challenge Owings might face is finding a publisher, since she presently does not have any kind of collaboration agreement with Seymour, though she has promised him a share in any profits. Owings said, “Del has told me, oh, he’ll sign anything, don’t worry about it,” but as one audience member pointed out, he is a self-confessed hustler.

Still, Owings believes Seymour is motivated mostly by a desire for some kind of redemption: “He’s still trying to exonerate himself from what he did before . . . make good for what he did bad.” And while Seymour’s life dominates the story, Owings has kept a focus on the larger issue of homelessness and how people on the streets—or, increasingly, those working full-time jobs and living in their cars—struggle to survive.