2024 Annual Conference
List of Panelists

is Editorial Director at Beacon Press. Authors she has worked with include Eboo Patel, Danya Ruttenberg, Angela Saini, Jonathan Metzl, Ralph Eubanks, and many others. Books she has edited have won the Grawemeyer Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Benedict Prize, have been named top ten books of the year by Nature, Smithsonian, and Physics World, NPR’s Science Friday, and have been finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Science and Technology and the NBCC awards. She is currently working with independent scholar Pamela Toler on a biography of the long unheralded Sigrid Schulze, one of the first reporters to warn Americans of the growing Nazi threat.

is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French, Graduate School of the City University of New York,  Officier of the Palmes Académiques, Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Getty fellowships, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, author of Surrealist Painters and Poets, Dora Maar: Picasso’s Weeping Woman, Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason, The Modern Art Cookbook, Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism, the editor of Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Literature, and The Harper Collins World Reader.

is president of Faith Childs Literary Agency in New York and represents novelists and nonfiction writers, including biographers, historians, critics and journalists. For three decades she has been actively engaged in efforts to increase the representation of people of color in the publishing industry. In the decade before becoming a literary agent, she was a lawyer. Among her authors are Elizabeth Alexander, Anne C. Bailey, Annette Gordon-Reed, Kerri K. Greenidge, Tamara Payne and Eric K. Washington.

graduated as a Commonwealth Scholar from King’s College, Cambridge. He served as a law professor and Dean at the Faculty of Law at The University of Alberta and a visiting professor in Japan and Taiwan. Christian read A Moveable Feast in the cafes of Aix-en-Provence when he was a young man studying French. Realizing that no one had written deeply about Mary Welsh Hemingway, Christian began researching her story–and discovered a woman vital to Hemingway’s art. Hemingway’s Widow was published in 2022. Christian is married to a lawyer and abstract artist, Kathryn Dykstra, and they live in a Mediterranean microclimate on Vancouver Island’s beautiful Saanich Inlet.

is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s Studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her definitive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol I The Early Years 1884 – 1933; Vol II The Defining Years 1933- 1938; Vol III The War Years and After 1939 -1962, published by Viking, was called “monumental and inspirational…[a] grand biography” by the New York Times Book Review. Eleanor Roosevelt Volume One, on the NY Times bestseller list for 3 months, received many awards, including the 1992 Biography Prize from the Los Angeles Times, and the Lambda Literary Award. Eleanor Roosevelt Volume II was a New York Times bestseller. ER I, II, III are available in Penguin Paperback and as an ebook.

is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and a distinguished lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of Lou Reed: A Life, and coauthor of Clive Davis’s autobiography, The Soundtrack of My Life, a New York Times bestseller. He won a Grammy Award for best album notes and he holds a PhD in American literature.

is an Emmy Award Winner and the founder and CEO of VidLit Productions, the world-renowned book marketing and content development company. She has co-edited and contributed to What Was I Thinking? 58 Bad Boyfriend Stories (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), based on the VidLit series of the same name. She is also a magazine writer of fiction and nonfiction. Well over one million people have viewed her short story, “Craziest,” on the web. She has deep experience leveraging a variety of internet technologies as well as film, video and animation production, podcasting, marketing, promotion, and has coached writers about the most effective ways of telling a story. Her digital career includes writing and producing original programming for Carrie Fisher, Bill Maher, David Foster Wallace, Cherry Lane Publishing, Microsoft Interactive, Bill Bryson, and others. She was Creative Director of News Corp’s internet content group, and has been a consultant to all of the major Hollywood studios in the area of digital rights and content strategy for over 20 years.

was a founding BIO board member and founding chair of the Hazel Rowley Prize Committee. She’s covered the book business for Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, and the London Bookseller, where she is currently U.S. Correspondent. Her first book was a cancer memoir, You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother (Norton). Her second, Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books, was done in conjunction with a fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School. She has just completed a biography of Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf, due to be published by Random House.

is a biographer and cultural historian who has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Boston University, and Harvard, and is currently Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. His group biography House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (Henry Holt, 2008) was designated a Spectator book of the year. His most recent biography, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World (FSG, 2022) was named a TLS book of the year. He contributed to the groundbreaking exhibition catalogue Boston’s Apollo at the Gardner Museum that won a George Wittenborn award for excellence in art publishing in 2020.

Ruth Franklin’s book Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016) won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and BIO’s Plutarch Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. She is also the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011), a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Writing. Her criticism and essays appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. She is currently at work on a book about Anne Frank for the Yale Jewish Lives series.

joined Yale University Press as Executive Editor in 2008. Before that, he was an acquiring editor at Basic Books. Authors he has worked with include Lynn Margulis, Richard Florida, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Melissa Harris-Perry, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, John Mearsheimer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Timothy Garton Ash, Barney Frank, Patrick Deneen, and Michael Walzer. Books he has edited have won the LA Times Book Award for science, the LA Times Book Award for history, the Bancroft Award, and many other prizes, and been shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

is professor of 20th-century U.S. history. Her courses focus on American politics, government, and social movements. Her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, was named a best book of 2022 by the Washington Post (Ten Best Books), The Atlantic (Ten Best Books), Publishers Weekly (Ten Best Books), The New Yorker (24 Essential Reads), The New York Times (100 Notable Books), Smithsonian (Ten Best History Books), and Barnes & Noble (Ten Best History Books). She is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. In addition to her teaching and research, Professor Gage writes for numerous journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, New York Times, and Washington Post.  

is an award-winning journalist who writes about the history of race and identity. His forthcoming books include Pushahead: The Story of Edward McCabe and his Dreams of Colonization, a children’s book, What Was the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921?, and Cow Tom’s Cabin, which examines the true story of Cow Tom, a former Black chief of the Creek Nation, and a narrative account of how many Black Native Americans, including Cow Tom’s descendants, were divided and marginalized by white supremacy in America. A senior fellow at Northeastern University’s Burnes Center for Social Change, he holds fellowships from New America, PEN America, and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

is the award-winning author of sixteen books, including the biographies Janis: Her Life and Music, named best nonfiction book of 2019 by the Texas Institute of Letters; A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton; and Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The (London) Times Literary Supplement, Oprah Daily, The Village Voice, and Entertainment Weekly. She teaches at the State University of New York-New Paltz and New York University. George-Warren is currently at work on a biography of Jack Kerouac.

an award-winning journalist and co-author (with writer Julia Scheeres) of Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman. Published by Seal Press in September 2022, this biography of William Randolph Hearst’s highest-paid woman writer has been called “broadminded, sharp-witted, fast-paced, and funny” by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate. Gilbert has authored three books on grief and loss: Passed and Present, Always Too Soon, and Parentless Parents.

is Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of W.W. Norton & Company. Authors he has worked with include Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers, New York Times Bestsellers Frans de Waal and Neil de Grasse Tyson, NBCC Award winner Saidiya Hartman, and biographers John Lahr, an NBCC Award winner, Dan Efron, William Souder, and Edward White, Los Angeles Times Book Award winners, Lyndall Gordon, long-listed for the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and William Taubman and Miranda Seymour, long-listed for the Plutarch Award. He is the author of Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-45, which won the Colby Award for the best work of military non-fiction by a first-time author, and a Distinguished Alumnus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. He lives with his wife, Emily Bestler, editorial director of Emily Bestler Books/Atria, in Bedford, NY.

is Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also co-directs the African American Trail Project.  She is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (2019).  Listed by the New York Times as one of its top picks of 2019, the book is the first biography of Boston editor, William Monroe Trotter, written in nearly fifty years.  The book received the Mark Lynton Prize in History, the Massachusetts Book Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Award, the Sperber Award from Fordham University, and the Peter J. Gomes Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society.  Black Radical was also short-listed for the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History, Boston, the Cundill History Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best biography.  Her most recent book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family (2022) was recently listed as a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe, among other publications.  Her writings have appeared in the Massachusetts Historical Review, the Radical History Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Guardian. 

is a reporter at Publishers Lunch and was a principal reporter for The Trial. A journalist, essayist, and critic, her work has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Slate, Longreads, and elsewhere. She was an in-house publicist and publicity director for adult and children’s books for more than a decade, handling campaigns for Jason Reynolds, Sarah J. Maas, Jenny Han, and Nathan Lane, and has also worked as a bookseller and book review editor. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from The New School.

founder and CEO of the Rights Factory, worked at the literary magazines Blood & Aphorisms and The Quarterly in the ’90s. He ran the edgy micropublisher, Gutter Press, from 1993 to 2002, as publisher, and launched the literary division of The Lavin Agency in 2003, building a client list and completing his first deals. He’s keen to discover and help new writers prepare their works for market, and to help them build lasting careers with their talent. Sam is also the host of the podcast Agent Provocateur, giving a behind-the-scenes view into publishing and agenting.

is an NEH Long-Term Fellow at the New York Public Library, where she is at work with Emily Setina on a co-authored biography of New York School poet and teaching pioneer Kenneth Koch. Their previous collaboration was a critical edition of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (Yale, 2012). Hollister holds a PhD in English from Yale and has taught at the University of Texas and the US Military Academy. Her work on US poetry, archives, and pedagogy has received support from the ACLS, NEH Summer Stipends, the American Philosophical Society, and others. She lives in Hightstown, NJ.

is Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University. His latest book, Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, published in October 2022 by Princeton University Press, examines the Gilded Age writer known as the poet laureate of his race. Jarrett also authored Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature, and he co-edited The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar and The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

For many years Angela V. John was professor of history at the University of Greenwich, London. She is currently an honorary professor at Swansea University and president of Llafur, the Welsh People’s History Society. She has written/edited a dozen books. They include biographies of the radical English war correspondent Henry W. Nevinson, and of his wife, Evelyn Sharp, suffragette, author and journalist, also a life of the American-born actor, Elizabeth Robins. Rocking the Boat: Welsh Women who Championed Equality 1840-1990 is an essay collection exploring different ways of writing biography. Angela is currently writing the life of Philip Burton.

is an award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of four biographies of American pop culture icons, including Jim Henson: The Biography (Ballantine, 2013) and Becoming Dr. Seuss (Dutton, 2019). He is a former BIO president (2014–2016), vice president, and board member, and has served as a congressional staffer, policy wonk, speechwriter, and comic book store manager. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is presently writing a history of the U.S. Capitol for Dutton Books.

is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University, where, as the Founding Director of the university’s Humanities Center, she created a conversational hub dedicated to diversity. She has held positions at Yale University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Illinois and also teaches writing through arts councils and writers’ centers. Kaplan’s previous books include Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, the first published collection of a major African American woman’s letters. This melding of biography, cultural history, and correspondence drew on nearly fifty archives and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, a New York Times Notable Book, a New York magazine “top five” book of the season, a Book of the Month Club pick, and the subject of feature articles in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

is an acclaimed author, performer, historian, educator and activist. She has written biographies for both children and adults. Her one-person show, The Lavender Blues: A Showcase of Queer Music Before World War II, is the source for her current biographical work-in-progress: a group biography of three of the seminal female musicians featured in The Lavender Blues. Sarah is a proud member of BIO and currently serves as BIO’s vice president as well as chair of BIO’s Publicity and Social Media Committee.

is a biographer and historian. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University. She has written two biographies, one on Jane Addams’s formative years, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (2005) and the other a short full life, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (2010). Her current project is a dual biography of the radical abolitionist-feminists, Sarah and Angelina Grimké. The book, tentatively titled American Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké and the Fight for Human Rights, is under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is a former board member of BIO.

is the producer and director of numerous documentary films, including Harlan County, USA and American Dream, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In 1991, Harlan County, USA was named to the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress and designated an American Film Classic. Nominated for nine Emmy awards, Barbara’s notable documentaries include Miss Sharon Jones, Shut Up and Sing, Gigi Gorgeous, Woodstock, Now and Then, and Running From Crazy, among many others. She has also directed and produced scripted films, episodic television, and commercials. Her Cabin Creek Films is based in New York City.

is a cartoonist, author, and educator whose work appears in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune. His 2021 book, When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers, has been named an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year and Top Ten Graphic Novel of 2021, and a Chicago Tribune Fall “Best Read.” His 2018 book, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, won the Bernard J. Brom­el Award for Biog­ra­phy and Mem­oir and was a final­ist for the Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award. He teaches at DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His next book, Einstein in Kafkaland, is slated for publication this fall.

has been making award-winning, innovative nonfiction films for over a decade.  This includes five features ­– most recently Listening to Kenny G, an HBO Original Documentary which premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival – and over a dozen short films.  A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Lane has also received grants and awards from the Sundance Film Festival, Cinereach, Creative Capital, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tribeca Film Institute, Wexner Center for the Arts and many others. Penny has been honored with mid-career retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, San Francisco DocFest, Open City Documentary Festival and Cinema Moderne. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And yes, Penny Lane is her real name.

is Professor Emerita of English, City University of New York. She has published widely on transnational modernism, Virginia Woolf, and Bloomsbury, and women writers including the group biography, Lily Briscoe’s ‘Chinese’ Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China; Julian Bell: The Violent Pacifist; and most recently, Elizabeth Bowen, A Literary Life (2021). Her literary criticism has been published in numerous collections, and includes The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition.

is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).  His latest biography, Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, was an instant New York Times bestseller. Visit him at www.DavidMaraniss.com.

is the author of The Peabody Sisters, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award; and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, a finalist for the Christian Gauss Award in Literary Criticism of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. A recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is the Charles Wesley Emerson Professor at Emerson College, a past president of the Society of American Historians, and the recipient of the 2022 BIO Award.

Justin Martin’s specialty is American history, meticulously researched, but delivered in a narrative style that’s akin to fiction. He’s the author of five books, including Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians. This group biography focuses on a colorful group of artists, regulars at Pfaff’s saloon in Manhattan. Besides a young Whitman, the circle included trailblazing stand-up comic Artemus Ward, psychedelic drug pioneer Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, and the brilliant brazen Adah Menken, who became world famous for her “Naked Lady” routine. A Fierce Glory, Martin’s most recent book, is about Antietam, a Civil War turning point. Unlike a typical military history, Martin emphasized character development over troop movements, portraying key figures both on and off the battlefield that fateful day: Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Clara Barton. Martin lives in New York City.

is Associate Professor of history at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He is a first-time biographer and author of Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem, published by Columbia University Press in July 2021. During the 1990s, Kevin McGruder served as the director of real estate development for the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit church-based organization in Harlem, and he wrote a book about race and real estate in Harlem.

BIO Award-winning writer James McGrath Morris is the author of five biographies and several works of narrative nonfiction. His newest book, Tony Hillerman: A Life, was a finalist for the Edgar Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America, and also for the Macavity Award, given each year by Mystery Readers International, the largest mystery fan organization in the world. He makes his home in Santa Fe, NM.

is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn. His recent books include It’s Life As a I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940-1980 and Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945-1976. Dan is a co-curator for a large-scale rethinking of the art history of the 1960s at the Whitney Museum of American Art (March 2025). He is currently at work on the biography of cartoonist Robert Crumb, which will be published by Scribner in 2024.

is the author of four books of nonfiction—one memoir, about her time in and around the Kingdom of Bhutan, and three biographies (the most recent of which is about the “founding mothers” of NPR. As a journalist, she’s worked at the NY Times, MSNBC and public radio’s Marketplace. A native of Brooklyn and a graduate of Hampshire College, she’s currently working on her Master’s degree in the Biography and Memoir program at CUNY. With Sonja Williams, she’s helped to create BIO’s podcast.

Janice P. Nimura‘s second book, The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women–and Women to Medicine, was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography. She received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her research on the Blackwells. Her previous book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, was a New York Times Notable book in 2015.

is the Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at Brown University.  He is the author  of The House of Diggs: The Untold Story of Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr.’s Activist Leadership – From Emmett Till to Anti-Apartheid – And the Scandal that Nearly Erased a Legacy of Social Justice (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming), the first biography of Michigan’s first Black congressman and perhaps the most consequential Black federal legislator to serve in the U.S. Congress.   He is the author and/or editor of seven books.  Orr is the 2022 recipient of  BIO’s Francis “Frank” Rollins Fellowship. The House of Diggs is his first biography.

is an editorial contractor and former journalist in Falls Church, Va. She has done writing and editing for many publications and websites, including National Geographic and The Washington Post, and for science organizations in Washington and Southeast Asia. A graduate of the University of Missouri’s j-school and Johns Hopkins University’s M.A. in writing program, she was one of the founding editors of the online Washington Independent Review of Books in 2011. In support of her first biography, Eliza Scidmore, the Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees (Oxford U. Press, March 2023), she received a Mayborn Fellowship in Biography and BIO’s 2017 Hazel Rowley Prize. Visit her website at www.dianaparsell.com.

BIO board secretary and program committee co-chair, is the author of Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend and Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell. The latter won the 2022 Bernard Brommel Award for best biography or memoir from the Society of Midland Authors. A longtime, semiretired reporter, editor, and book critic, and a former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, he is now at work on a biography of the American poet William Stafford. He also moderates a long-running online BIO roundtable on literary biography. Website: stevepaulkc.com.

worked with her late father, the  award-winning and New York-based print journalist Les Payne, to co-write The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X. Published in October 2020 by Liveright, this biography of the charismatic and controversial Muslim leader known as Malcolm X earned a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Ph.D., is the author of Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy. She is a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center where she co-directs the Cold War Archival Research Institute (CWAR). At the Oxford University Centre for Life Writing she is working on a biography of Eleanor Lansing Dulles (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield), while pursuing a second doctorate in Theology and Religion. She is co-founder of the Global Biography Working Group, serves on the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History board, and her papers are held at the Library of Congress.

is the CEO of the Authors Guild and the Authors Guild Foundation where she oversees all aspects of the combined organizations. Jointly the organizations work to protect the rights of authors to free speech, fair contracts, and just treatment under copyright and other laws. The Authors Guild also empowers authors with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed in the business of writing. Prior to joining the Guild in 2014, Mary practiced law for over 25 years in roles that spanned private practice, the federal government and corporate sector, as a recognized expert in copyright and media law. From 2002 to 2008 Mary worked for the U.S. Copyright Office and Library of Congress as senior policy advisor and program director for the National Digital Preservation Program. Prior to coming to the Guild, Mary was a partner at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, and previously Counsel at Skadden Arps.

is a vice president and executive editor at Random House, where she edits several best-selling and award-winning authors, including Tara Westover, Ed Yong, Merlin Sheldrake,Pamela Colloff, Heidi Schreck, Kate Bowler, Kathryn Schulz, Rachel Swarns, Lauren Redniss, Jennifer Vanderbes, Margalit Fox, Zoe Chance, Kashmir Hill, Ross Andersen, Ferris Jabr, Vann Newkirk II, and Jenny Odell. She focuses on all kinds of nonfiction with a particular focus on science, memoir, history, criticism, investigative journalism, and narrative that brings these subjects together in surprising ways.

has published biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Rebecca West, Jill Craigie, Michael Foot, Dana Andrews, Sylvia Plath, Amy Lowell, Walter Brennan, and William Faulkner. He is at work on Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero and Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History. His reviews of biographies appear every Wednesday in the New York Sun. He has a weekly podcast, A Life in Biography (https://anchor.fm/carl-rollyson) and is the consulting editor for the Hollywood Legends series, University Press of Mississippi.

as President of the Ross Yoon Agency, represents important commercial nonfiction in a variety of areas and counts top doctors, CEO’s, prize-winning journalists, and historians, and experts in a variety of fields are among her clients.  She and her team have earned a reputation in the industry for providing rigorous, enthusiastic editorial guidance at all stages of the publishing process. Gail also is a partner in the law firm of Trister, Ross, Schadler & Gold, PLLC where she focuses on the legal aspects of publishing and media law.  Gail writes and lectures frequently on publishing issues.

is the author of Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), and is currently at work on I Am Meg: The Life of Madeleine L’Engle, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar grant (2022), a Sustainable Arts Foundation award (2021), and a Leon Levy Center for Biography fellowship (2019). Her essays have appeared in Vanity Fair and Literary Hub, among other publications.

is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize; Cleopatra: A Life and The Witches, both #1 bestsellers; and, most recently, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has been named a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is author of The Writer in the Darkroom: Photography and Biography in Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore (Oxford, forthcoming) and has published numerous essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and artists. With Susannah Hollister, she is currently at work on a co-authored biography of New York School poet and teaching pioneer Kenneth Koch. Their previous collaboration was a critical edition of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (Yale, 2012).

is a biographer, journalist, filmmaker, and NYU journalism professor. She writes for many publications, including The
New Yorker and The New York Times. As a director, she has won the Independent Spirit Award and was nominated for an Emmy. Her unlikely New Yorker story, “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes,” won a 2021 GANYC Apple Award for best article, and her New York Times profile of a living WWII pilot received the 2022 Silurian Press Club gold medallion as best profile. The Stowaway, her first nonfiction book, was an Indie Next selection and national bestseller. Viking Books will publish her narrative nonfiction tale of Amelia Earhart’s marriage in 2024.

teaches constitutional law, constitutional history, and sports law. He is the author of Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment (Norton). He has published law review articles in the Vanderbilt Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Law & History Review, UC-Davis Law Review, and Boston College Law Review and is the author of The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017). Prior to law teaching, Professor Snyder worked as an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP and wrote two critically acclaimed books about baseball including A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports (Viking/Penguin, 2006). A graduate of Duke University and Yale Law School, he clerked for the Hon. Dorothy W. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

PhD, teaches art history at the University of San Francisco, where she specializes in modern, contemporary, and African art. Stahr is particularly interested in artists who cross cultural boundaries. Her book Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist was published in 2020 by St. Martin’s Press. It received many positive reviews in publications such as the New York Times and Art in America. Booklist named it in their master list of Editors’ Choice: Adult Books of 2020. Stahr will appear in a three-part BBC docuseries on Frida Kahlo that is slated to air in 2023.

as a lawyer, was a law clerk to a federal district judge, litigation partner in a law firm and senior counsel in a financial institution. She also taught seminars on American law in six foreign countries, including as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Her book, They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men (Cynren Press 2022), is a collection of biographical profiles of women who rejected the housewife paradigm of the mid-20th century and instead had careers in male-dominated professions. Her website is kathleencstone.com.

is a journalist, author and professor, who writes about race and race relations as a contributing writer for The New York Times. She has reported on immigration, presidential politics and First Lady Michelle Obama. She also has reported from Russia, Cuba, Guatemala and southern Africa, where she served as the Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief. She is currently an associate professor of journalism at New York University. She is the author of American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama and a co-author of Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives. Her forthcoming book about Georgetown University’s roots in slavery will be published by Random House.

a historian, a biographer, and a practicing clinical psychologist, is one of the founding board members of the Biographers International Organization. A former president of the organization, Swift developed BIO’s well-regarded Editorial Excellence Award, which is presented each year to an exemplary editor at a mainstream or university press. Swift’s first two books, The Roosevelts and the Royals (2004) and The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm (2008), tell the stories of the intersections of two of America’s top political dynasties and the British Royal Family during wartime and the intervening periods of peace. Swift’s Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of a Marriage illuminates the power dynamics of a misunderstood marriage.

is the Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library, which holds the archives and related collections of Frances Burney, Charles Dickens, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Koch and many others. She has organized a number of exhibitions, including on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Emily Dickinson, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, the screenplays of James Ivory, and authors who have drawn their inspiration from the collections of the New York Public Library. 

is the author of Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal, a biography of a once influential Harlem Renaissance-era labor leader, which won the Herbert H. Lehman Prize and the GANYC Apple Award and was finalist for the Brendan Gill Prize. He was a CUNY Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellow, a Fellow-in-Residence of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston/Brown Foundation’s Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, and an A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholar of Columbia University from 2014 to 2017. He is a board member of the Biographers International Organization (BIO) and New York City’s Archives, Reference, and Research Advisory Board (ARRAB). His first book, Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem, inspired a design project awarded the 2010 MASterworks Award from the Municipal Art Society of New York. He is the founding owner of Tagging-the-Past, a public history organization.

is an author and magazine writer whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and New York, among other publications. She is the author of the much- praised New York Times bestseller Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation. She is also the author of the acclaimed family memoir Dancing at Ciro’s: A Family’s Love, Loss and Scandal on the Sunset Strip and The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour—and the Triumph of Women in TV News. Her latest book is the lauded Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge.

is a senior editor at Viking where she publishes nonfiction in a range of categories. She is drawn to strong voices; undiscovered or underappreciated histories and figures, and fresh takes on known ones; new arguments that recast our understanding of the world around us; and books on women’s issues and social justice. She ran a nonfiction literary reading series in Manhattan called Big Umbrella, and prior to Viking, she worked at Gotham Books and Macmillan. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri and began her publishing career at the Missouri Review.

is a co-host of The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast since the summer of 2007, acclaimed as a vital resource for those who love storytelling and history and winner of the 2015 GANYC Award for Outstanding Achievement in Radio Program/Podcasts (audio/spoken word). He is co-author of  Adventures In Old New York that won the 2016 GANYC Award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Book Writing.

is the features director of The New Yorker. He edits many of the magazine’s staff writers, among them David Grann, Jane Mayer, Patrick Radden Keefe, Ian Parker, Lawrence Wright, and Rebecca Mead. Previously, he was an editor at the Times Magazine and at Lingua Franca. At The New Yorker, he has published Profiles of such figures as Ian McEwan, Guillermo del Toro, and Werner Herzog, and he has written about everything from amnesia to art restoration.

professor emerita of history at Miami University (Ohio), wrote Emilie Du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (2006). Her articles on the marquise have appeared in journals in both the US and Europe, and in edited collections on the era. She collaborated on a translation of Du Châtelet’s writings published in 2009. Zinsser is also co-author of the two-volume classic, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present (2000). Zinsser’s current project, on the third Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (1938-62), takes readers from its origins in Europe to North America after World War II stranded the company in the US.