Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships

July 1st, 2018

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is introducing a new fellowship program this year—the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships—to support the research ambitions of community college faculty in the humanities and related social sciences. The program, which has its first application deadline on September 26, 2018, will offer up to 26 fellowships of $40,000 to community college faculty working on a diverse range of research projects. You can find out more about the program here.

Like all ACLS fellowship programs, this program will use a peer review process to evaluate applications and select fellows. ACLS is currently looking for community college faculty in all fields of the humanities and related social sciences to serve as reviewers for the program’s inaugural competition or in a future year. Serving as a reviewer would involve evaluating 25-30 applications in the reviewer’s discipline using an online portal. Reviewers will have approximately six weeks this fall to score the applications and enter very brief comments. The honorarium for service is $200.

Anyone interested in serving as a reviewer next fall or in a future year should email ACLS program officer Rachel Bernard no later than July 18 with the following information: name(s), email address, institution, faculty rank/title, department, and discipline.

Different Lives Conference

June 24th, 2018

On September 20 and 21, 2018, BIO joins the Biography Institute and the Biography Society in hosting the conference “Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies.” The conference will take place in Groningen, Netherlands, home of the Biography Institute, which is directed by BIO member Hans Renders. The event will allow biographers to look beyond their own borders, explore how biography is practiced in other parts of the world, and discuss the cultural perspectives that guide biographers in their approach to the infinite complexity of their subjects.

With a mix of panel, roundtable, and public discussions, featuring speakers from many nations, this conference is designed to present the state of the art of biography from a wealth of different perspectives. The 2018 BIO Award-winner Richard Holmes will deliver the keynote address, and BIO members participating include Carl Rollyson, John A. Farrell, and Nigel Hamilton. The latter will host a master class on Wednesday, September 19, for young biographers working on their first books.

Also on Wednesday, attendees can choose to explore two cultural sites in and around Groningen: Museum of Graphic Arts and Camp Westerbork. The latter features an exhibition depicting the Netherlands during World War II, focusing on the persecution of Jews.

The cost of the conference is 60 euros, with additional fees for the optional cultural tours and the conference dinner on September 21. Get more information and register here. If you require assistance in booking hotel or travel arrangements, email the conference board. You can see the entire conference program here.

Caroline Fraser Wins Plutarch Award

May 23rd, 2018

Caroline Fraser won the 2018 Plutarch Award for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book had previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, among other honors. Fraser received her award at the ninth annual BIO Conference on May 20.

The Plutarch is the world’s only literary award given to biography by biographers. Named after the famous Ancient Greek biographer, the Plutarch is determined by secret ballot from a formal list of nominees selected by a committee of distinguished members of the craft. The award comes with a $1,000 honorarium.

BIO’s Plutarch Award Committee for 2018 was:

Anne C. Heller, chair
Kate Buford
Nassir Ghaemi
Brian Jay Jones
Andrew Lownie
Julia Markus
J.W. (Hans) Renders
Ray Shepard
Will Swift, ex-officio

You can find out more information about the Plutarch Award here.

Exploring the Depth of Subjects’ Souls: An Interview with 2018 BIO Award-Winner Richard Holmes

May 9th, 2018

By James Atlas
A great biographer is someone who writes great biographies. A revolu- tionary biographer is someone who writes revolutionary biographies. Since the publication of his massive, ingenious, and mesmerizing debut, Shelley: The Pursuit, published when he was twenty-nine, Richard Holmes has written seven biographies and assembled four collections of biographical essays uniform only in their strange, unclassifiable aura. Holmes’s essential principle is not simply to write about his subjects but to inhabit them—and, to borrow his own description of his method, to haunt them.

All biographers aspire to know the people they’re writing about, to get beneath their skin, as Claire Tomalin, that other master of the craft, puts it; Holmes aspires to become them. In the quest of this goal—the source of his power as a biographer—he has perambulated with the ghost of Dr. Johnson in St. James Square, tracked Shelley to the site of his drowning in the Gulf of La Spezia, shadowed Coleridge to every corner of the Lake District. Untethered to the library, he has gone up in a hot-air balloon and risked his life in a sailing adventure that required a rescue by helicopter in the course of his research. But Holmes’s greatest journey has been inward, to the depths of his subjects’ souls. He has gone, he writes, in This Long Pursuit (his new collection of essays), not just to “the blue-plaque place” but to “the temporary places, the passing place, the lost places, the dream places” where the real story is.

In the terrestrial sense, he lives in London and Norfolk with his partner, the novelist Rose Tremain.

James Atlas: One of your most famous innovations as a biographer has been the idea of biography as not simply a recording but a “haunting,” a “pursuit” of one’s subject. What is the origin of this method, first articulated in Footsteps and a ruling principle of your work ever since? Has it been refined and how does it continue to preside over your work?
Richard Holmes: I think the idea of biography as a journey of pursuit actually goes back a long way, such as in A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo (1934), and there are elements of a pursuit even in [Edward] Trelawny’s wonderful and disreputable Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858). My pursuit began quite naively as a lonely teenager simply finding that I was “walking with” Robert Louis Stevenson (who died in 1894) through the remote Cevennes hills in southern France. But it was extraordinarily vivid, almost a continuous hallucination over 200 kilometers, lasting many days. It was perhaps an extension of that experience that many people have in their childhoods of inventing an “imaginary friend.” But my friend eventually turned out to be real. The pursuit of Shelley, Johnson, Coleridge, Herschel, and the others that followed was just a sophisticated version of this, with additional documentation, so to speak. It is a pursuit through space (geography) but also through time (history).

JA: You speak of empathy as the biographer’s dominant task. How is this difficult, imaginative feat to be achieved? Why is it the crucial component of his art?
RH: Yes, I have called empathy the most necessary and most perilous of biographical gifts. Philosophically, you can never know how another person actually feels, but imaginatively I believe you can. So biography not only attempts to narrate the events of a life—to tell the story—but to enter imaginatively into it and tell the inside story. It requires a long, faithful, passionate immersion in letters, journals, contemporary memoirs, places, and objects. And simply immense, insane amounts of time spent in your subject’s company—somewhere between three and 10 years perhaps. The process is something I have described as an extended handshake. My feeling is that at the end of a biography the reader should know not only what this person “was like,” but what it was “like to be” this person.

JA: Could you bring us up to date on the Master’s degree program in Biography at the University of East Anglia? Is it still a going concern?
RH: I originally launched and designed this MA in Biography in 2001, and taught it for some five years, and thereafter contributed an occasional lecture. (I give a detailed account of the program and of why I think biography is so valuable to teach in my most recent book, This Long Pursuit.) My colleague, the biographer Kathryn Hughes, took it over and is still running it with great success, now as the MA in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction, with some dozen students every year (several American). The two other teachers are both accomplished biographers: Ian Thompson (Primo Levi, 2002) and Helen Smith (The Uncommon Reader, 2017).

JA: Could you say something about your current project? What are you writing now?
RH: Ah, the “current project”! Not sure I think quite like that, more like the “current distractions” (in the plural). Right at this moment I am writing a short study of the inspirational American astronomer and teacher (Nantucket and Vassar) Maria Mitchell (born 1818), who also toured the observatories of Europe. After The Age of Wonder I am still very interested in the way scientific discovery has steadily (sometimes violently) transformed our imaginative vision of the world around us, especially in the years immediately before Darwin’s theory of evolution became the new orthodoxy. Whether this will be done through a traditional biography, a group biography, or some much more personal footstep, I am still not sure. One provoking but strictly working title has been Tennyson and the Kraken, referring to the legendary deep-sea monster which threatens to surface in one of Tennyson’s earliest poems and which haunted the Victorian unconscious—a symbol of all kinds of modern disruption—for a generation.

James Atlas is the author of The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale and the founder of the Penguin Lives Series.

Departing BIO President Will Swift Reflects on His Accomplishments

May 9th, 2018

TBC: What was it like being president?
Will Swift: Haven’t I always been the president of BIO? We shift our identities more easily than we think—I can barely remember not being in the role. Have two years actually passed since I took over the presidency at the Richmond conference? Time flows swiftly when you are fully engaged in a passionate endeavor. I love supporting writers and writing.

At the age of seventy, I heed psychologist Eric Erickson’s advice about the next-to-last stage in life: Engage in generativity (passing on wisdom and knowledge to future generations) or risk falling into self-absorption. I have experienced deep satisfaction co-creating BIO as a healthy and synergistic family that offers stimulation and inspiration to both aspiring and accomplished biographers.

I have done my best to model perseverance and grit to help you face down the obstacles that are strewn across the paths of writing, researching, and selling books in this increasingly picky and parsimonious publishing world. As an obsessive personality who sends out emails at 4:30 a.m., I have needed to stretch myself to work with a multitude of personalities who have radically different styles and rhythms. It has been big fun creating new programs that honor the accomplishments of writers and editors.

Most of all, I have enjoyed the remarkable collegiality and teamwork that has made the last two years so gratifying. I was lucky to inherit Marc Leepson—an affable, calm, and super rational guiding hand—as my treasurer. It was my good fortune that Deirdre David—a truly loyal, creative, and competent administrator—agreed to be my vice president, and that Dean King, a strategically gifted leader, signed on as treasurer and as part of my executive committee. I treasure the friendship and wisdom of Debby Applegate, James Atlas, Kai Bird, Kate Buford, Robert and Ina Caro, Cathy Curtis, John Farrell, Irv Gellman, Anne Heller, Brian Jay Jones, Kitty Kelley, Sarah Kilborne, Linda Leavell, Heath Lee, Megan Marshall, James McGrath Morris, Stacy Schiff, and so many others who helped me in BIO, which is, at its best, a truly generative organization. What more could I want as I entered my seventieth decade: a creative home where I felt a strong sense of belonging, cultivated lifelong friendships, expressed myself fully, and helped others build their skills and their confidence.

TBC: What goals did you set and accomplish?
WS: In my first speech as BIO president at the 2015 conference in Richmond, I pledged to be the “captain of the BIO ship as it steers into calmer financial waters,” and I explained that we needed to change our financial direction one small step at a time. Our first move was to align ourselves under the 501(c)(3) wing of the tax exempt charity Virginia Organizing. Last year, for the first time, we raised corporate funds to support our Boston conference. We hope to do so in New York as well. Our board now contributes financially and BIO members support us through our year-end appeal. We no longer have to ask board members for loans to afford the down payments on our conferences, and we have the luxury of starting new programs and finding ways to fund them.

Another of my goals was to expand our services to international conferences.  Our November 2016 “Biography Beyond Borders” conference, held in conjunction with Dame Hermione Lee’s Center for Life-Writing at Oxford, was a smashing success—mostly due to the efforts of Deirdre David, who spearheaded it. This fall our second foreign conference—“Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies”—will be held in Groningen in the Netherlands. The September 20 and 21, 2018, event will be co-hosted by BIO, the Biography Institute, and the Biography Society. It will delve deeper into the question of how the art of biography is practiced in other parts of the world.

I envisioned and created a revamped Advisory Council, under the leadership of Debby Applegate, filled with top biographers and editors and agents, whom we actively consult.

We expanded our efforts to advocate for the place of biography in the larger world. We carefully constructed several letters to the Pulitzer Prize administrator requesting that they move biography out of its joint category with memoir and into a category of its own. With over a thousand biographies published each year, it does not make sense to us to see biography lumped in with autobiography, and especially last year, when a memoir won the Pulitzer and two memoirs were finalists. There was no recognition for biography.

Creating a vibrant and diverse board and leaving our new president with powerful and committed new board members. Done!

Forming an alliance with the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Working with Brian Jay Jones and James McGrath Morris to expand our membership to over 400 members.

Expanding learning opportunities and services for our members (see below).

TBC: What are you most proud of?
WS: * Putting BIO on a financially sound footing so we can develop programs and recruit members with less worry about our bottom line.
* Creating the Robert and Ina Caro Fellowship to award travel funds. The two writers who were selected for 2018 will be traveling to Italy and Russia in order to convey a vibrant and revelatory sense of place in their biographies.
* Developing the mentorship program, which encourages biographers to share their work and their concerns with more experienced authors.
* Creating an inclusive atmosphere, so new members can feel welcome at our annual conferences.
* Forging a solid connection between BIO and the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
* Co-creating with three terrific program committees the outstanding annual conferences in Richmond, Boston, and New York.

TBC: How would you like to see BIO develop?
WS: * Forming our own 501(c)(3).
* Finding several major funders to make substantial yearly donations.
* Developing more legacy videos and regional training programs in between the annual conferences.
* Offering more writing programs in the schools.
* Developing a speaker’s bureau.

TBC: What do you plan to do with your time now?
WS: According to our bylaws, a former president cannot serve as a BIO board member for one year after leaving office. I will work actively behind the scenes advising the president and vice president, when they want assistance. My last important presidential act was to ask Megan Marshall to chair the 2019 Plutarch Committee. She agreed, and I will do whatever I can to assist her. Cathy Curtis has asked me to chair the Awards Committee. I held this position for many years and loved doing it. Beyond that, I feel a vague anxiety about not knowing what other tasks outside of BIO might come my way. I am open to ideas.

TBC: Why did you ask Cathy Curtis to run for president?
WS: Cathy, a former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, is an extremely smart, detail-oriented, and strategic leader. As our former vice president, she has a remarkable memory for BIO’s history and procedures. She has served on the Plutarch Committee and as chair of the Awards Committee. At the 2017 Boston conference, I called her BIO’s secret MVP. I have always been able to count on her judgment and her organizational advice. She embodies full commitment to BIO.

James Atlas Interviews 2018 BIO Award Winner Richard Holmes

May 9th, 2018

Photo: Stuart Clarke

Acclaimed literary biographer Richard Holmes will receive the 2018 BIO Award at BIO’s upcoming conference in New York and give the keynote speech on May 19. As a preview of that, James Atlas interviewed Holmes; you can read the interview here.

Being There

March 11th, 2018

In recalling the seven years of research that went into the first volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power (1982), Robert Caro describes driving from Austin, where he was working at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, to the Hill Country that spreads out to the west in an “incredible empty panorama.” Stopping his car, he spotted in the distance the ranch in the valley of the Pedernales River where Johnson grew up. And shortly thereafter, he announced to his wife, Ina, that they needed to move to the Hill Country in order to understand fully Johnson’s early life. For the best part of the next three years, they lived in rural Texas, driving to isolated ranches and farms to interview people who remembered the hardships of the Hill Country and who grew up and went to college with Lyndon Johnson. As Caro puts it, they “helped make up his first political machine.” Caro needed to be there.

In 2017, Robert and Ina Caro graciously agreed that BIO should establish a Travel Fellowship in their name and Kitty Kelley generously offered to support the first year of funding for the award: $5,000. The review committee (Kate Buford, Marc Leepson, and me [as chair]) stipulated that proposals should specify as fully as possible how traveling to a particular location would enable the biographer to develop the importance of a sense of place. Just as living in the desolate Hill Country enabled Caro to grasp the conditions that shaped Johnson as a politician, applicants for the fellowship were asked to tell us where they wished to go and why they needed to be there.

We received 21 impressive submissions. Among other places, people wanted to travel to Northern Ireland, to Senis just north of Paris, to Korea, to Brooklyn, to Ohio, to Maine, to New Mexico, and to West Virginia. Our two winners, each of whom will receive $2,500, were Natalie Dykstra, Professor of English at Hope College, and Marina Harss, dance writer and translator. Natalie will be traveling to Florence, Milan, and Venice, cities where her biographical subject, Isabella Stewart Gardner, assembled paintings, drawings, tapestries, porcelain, mirrors, and other objects to be placed in her eponymous museum that opened in Boston in 1903. Marina will be visiting various locations that played an important part in the artistic development of the distinguished choreographer who is the subject of her biography, Alexei Ratmansky—Kiev, Moscow, Copenhagen, and St. Petersburg. Natalie, in particular, was inspired by Robert Caro’s memorable line taken from his 2011 BIO Conference talk, “The greatest of books are books with places you can see in your mind’s eye.”

When Robert and Ina read the two winning submissions, Robert wrote to say, “They both sound just perfect for what we all have in mind. You can see how vital a sense of place is in both of these books, and if this fellowship helps the two authors achieve it, everyone connected with the fellowship will, I think, be able to take pride in having helped a little bit in the achievement.” At our conference in May at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, to be held in collaboration with the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Natalie and Marina will receive their awards and meet Ina and Robert Caro. They will all be there.

Two Writers Share the Inaugural Caro Fellowship

March 11th, 2018

Natalie Dykstra and Marina Harss will each receive $2,500 as the winners of the first Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship. BIO introduced the fellowship in 2017 to honor the Caros’ work and help biographers establish a sense of place to delineate their subject’s character. You can read more about Dykstra, Harss, and the fellowship in the March Letter from the Vice President by Deirdre David.