2025 Montgomery Conference
List of Panelists

Hannah Durkin is an historian whose most recent book, The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade (2024), about the Africans trafficked on the last US slave ship (Mobile Bay,1860), was named an Amazon Best Book of 2024, one of the Washington Post’s “50 Notable Works of Nonfiction,” a New Yorker recommended book, and shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Nonfiction Crown Award. Durkin is an advisor to the History Museum of Mobile, which memorializes the Clotilda survivors, and the Clotilda Descendants Association, which traces survivors’ descendants, and has received more than a dozen academic prizes.

Tanisha Ford is an NAACP Image award-winning writer, cultural critic, and Professor of History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her most recent book, Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement (2023) explores the Black women who raised millions of dollars for social justice causes. Other books include Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (2019) and Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (2015). Ford teaches courses on history, biography, memoir, social movements, girlhood studies, and is one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans, among numerous other awards.

Maryemma Graham is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas and is the author of The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is a founder of the History of Black Writing Research Center. Through her work at HBW, she has led initiatives that promote research, teaching, and public engagement with Black literary studies. She received an American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement (2021). Her books include The Cambridge History of African American Literature, Teaching African American Literature, and the translingual volume Toni Morrison: Au delà du visible ordinaire/Beyond the Visible and Ordinary. She is currently working on the Cambridge History of the African American Novel with Keith Gilyard and her memoir.

Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University, is a BIO board member and the author of Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (Harper Collins 2013) and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (Doubleday/Anchor 2023), and the editor of Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novels, Quicksand and Passing, among other works. She is the recipient of an NEH “Public Scholar” and a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been a Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center, the W.E.B. DuBois Center, and elsewhere, and was Founding Director of the Northeastern University Humanities Center. She is a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

Kevin McGruder is Associate Professor of History at Antioch College and the author of Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021), which was called a “timely and important biography” (Khalil Gibran Muhammad) of a pioneering businessman. In 2024 he was awarded BIO’s Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for Rudolph Fisher: Harlem’s Interpreter, a biography in progress about the influential Harlem Renaissance-era writer. His keen interest in urban history focusing on racial residential patterns produced the meticulously researched book, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1920 (2015), and his interest in LGBTQ history led to his editorship of Home at Last: The Collected Writings of AIDS Journalist LeRoy Whitfield (Fire Press, 2022).

Steve Paul is president of BIO and is now at work on his third literary biography. He’s a career journalist, a longtime book critic, and a magazine columnist whose subjects range across the arts, American culture, and books. A native of New England, he has long lived and worked in Kansas City, MO.

Ray Anthony Shepard, a founding board member of BIO, is the author of A Long Time Coming (Calkins Creek Books, 2023).

Eric K. Washington, a BIO board member, is a historian and author. His debut biography, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal (Liveright, 2019), was lauded as “an illuminating chronicle” (Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal) that invoked “a fitting exemplar of Harlem’s ambitious Black middle class” (Publishers Weekly). His book won Columbia University’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship of New York History, the Guides Association of New York City’s GANYC Apple Award and special recognition from the Municipal Art Society of New York’s Brendan Gill Prize committee. He chairs BIO’s annual Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, awarded for a biography-in-progress on an African American figure.