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Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship

Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship Deadline February 15

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.  The Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship in Biography will provide financial support so that a doctoral candidate may devote a year to completing a dissertation in the biography field. A fellow is expected to pursue the dissertation project full-time during the funding period and must be writing a dissertation…

February 7, 2025
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Conference

BIO partners with Troy University to Sponsor National Conference on Black Biography

BIO will host the first major national conference on Black biography in over 40 years. Telling the Stories of Black Lives through Biography will be co-sponsored by Troy University-Montgomery, Alabama, and will take place on March 21-22, 2025. The conference will feature a full day of speakers, panel discussions, receptions, and other activities. Telling the Stories of Black Lives through Biography is the brainchild of author and longtime BIO board member Ray Anthony Shepard, who says of the conference, “On March 21 and 22, 2025, as the nation begins to commemorate its founding, a cadre of biographers and biography enthusiasts will gather in Montgomery, Alabama, to consider this critical question: How can we honestly celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Republic without reckoning with the role of the slave system and its impact on America today? Montgomery is a symbolic forge of Black lives inside America—where the heat of slavery flamed, and the hammer of civil rights toughened the resolve of a 21st-century America.” The conference keynote speaker will be A’Lelia Bundles, author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother and the nonfiction…

January 21, 2025
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Biography

Biography Lab Registration is Open!

Biographers International Organization (BIO) is excited to announce Biography Lab 2025, its third annual online forum, which will be held via Zoom on Saturday, January 18, 2025, from 10:30 am – 5:00 pm EST. BIO invites participants at all levels of interest and experience in the craft of biography to participate in three sequential 90-minute forums led by prominent biographers and people in publishing. Free for BIO members and students. $60 General Admission. Register now! Schedule: John A. Farrell, Is Biography still Relevant in the Age of X, Trump and Truthiness? (The keynote address is prerecorded and can be viewed any time after 8:00 a.m.) 10:30 – noon: Jean Strouse, Three Wildly Different Stories Noon – 12:30: Break 12:30 – 2:00: Susan Leon, The Art of Great Biography: Reflections from across an Editor’s Desk 2:00 – 2:15: Break 2:15 – 3:45: Yunte Huang, The Chinese Art of Biographical Writing 4:00 – 5:00: Social Hour

December 11, 2024
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Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship

BIO Announces the Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship

The Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship in Biography will provide $25,000 to a doctoral student who is writing a dissertation in English focused on the life of another person or upon the lives of two or more individuals. This generous fellowship is endowed by Kitty Kelley, a founding member BIO and long-time advocate for biography and biographers, as well as the bestselling author of multiple biographical works where she has displayed courage and deftness in writing unvarnished accounts of some of the most powerful 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.   Reflecting on the impact of this new fellowship, BIO Committee Chair Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina remarks, “BIO is delighted to offer this exciting opportunity for a Ph.D. student writing a biography as their dissertation. Kitty Kelley’s generosity in funding a biographical project at the dissertation level will go a long way to encourage the writing of biography at the final stages of academic training. We hope that the fellowship will inspire universities to endorse such projects, which combine the rigor of doctoral research with the art of storytelling.”  Kitty Kelley said of her…

October 15, 2024
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Conference

Call for 2025 BIO Conference Proposals

The 2025 BIO Conference is tentatively scheduled for June 5–6, in Washington, D.C. The Program Committee co-chairs, Natalie Dykstra and Linda Leavell, invite BIO members to submit proposals. The Program Committee will review these proposals for possible inclusion in the 2025 program. The Committee seeks panels that address the concerns of beginning biographers (basics), the craft of biography (craft), issues of interest to a broad range of biographers (issues and innovations), and topics related to Washington, D.C. Our tentative theme is “Potomac Fever.” Please refer to the programs of past conferences for guidance. To propose a panel, send an email here with "BIO Conference Proposal" in the subject line and your last name in the file name of any attachment. The proposal shall include: A title Your name and contact information A description of the panel (about 100–150 words) If possible, a list of potential panelists and a moderator. Panelists should be published biographers or other experts on the topic, and together they should represent a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. It is not necessary to obtain commitments from them before submitting the proposal. There is no guarantee of acceptance of any proposal, and accepted proposals are subject to modification by the…

June 21, 2024
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Awards

Yepoka Yeebo’s Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World wins the 2024 BIO Plutarch Award

Biographers International Organization (BIO) is excited to announce that Yepoka Yeebo’s ANANSI’S GOLD: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World (Bloomsbury) is the winner of the 2024 Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2023. The Plutarch is the only international prize of its kind. Named after the famous Greek writer, the Plutarch is awarded to the best biography of the year by a committee of five distinguished biographers, and this prestigious prize comes with a $2,000 honorarium.In a captivating, genre-bending debut, Yepoka Yeebo reconstructs the strange life of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a big, cigar-chomping flim-flam man from Ghana who masterminded one of the largest, longest-running con jobs the world has ever seen. Yeebo sets the stage in the tumultuous early days of independence from British colonialism, when most of Ghana’s considerable wealth was still held in London. When Ghana asked for its money, much of it had disappeared in bad investments. The scandal lodged in Blay-Miezah’s brain, where it morphed over time into a bold plan glued together with criminal intent. For years Blay-Miezah lived lavishly and outwitted his investors as well as Ghanaian governments, Swiss bankers, British businessmen, and the FBI. To research this brilliant study of human…

May 17, 2024
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Conference

The 2024 BIO Conference is Now in Progress!

The 2024 BIO Conference is now underway at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. You can view the digital conference program here. The following events and sessions will be live-streamed for virtual attendees: Thursday, May 16, 2024 4:00 p.m.–4:45 p.m.: Member Readings: BIO members read excerpts from their recent biographies. 4:45 p.m.–5:30 p.m.: Presentation Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowships, the Chip Bishop Fellowship, the Francis “Frank” Rollin Fellowships, and the Hazel Rowley Prize Friday, May 17, 2024 8:40 a.m.–9 a.m.: Welcome, Kai Bird (Leon Levy Center for Biography) and Steve Paul (Biographers International Organization) 9:00 a.m.–10 a.m.: James Atlas Plenary, Tamara Payne and Thulani Davis in conversation 10:15 a.m.–11:15 a.m.: Panels Session I, Basics: “What Editors Want Today”: Amanda Vaill (Jerome Robbins, by Himself), moderator; Bob Bender (Simon & Schuster), Rakia Clark (Mariner Books/HarperCollins), Charles Spicer (St. Martin's). 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.: Panels Session II, “Merging Biography and Memoir”: Linda M. Grasso (Equal Under the Sky), moderator; Megan Marshall (Elizabeth Bishop), Marnie Mueller (The Showgirl and the Writer). [12:30 p.m.–2 p.m. lunch break] 2 p.m.–3 p.m.: Presentation of Plutarch Award and BIO Award 3:15 p.m.–4:15 p.m.: Panels Session III, Issues: “Intimacy and Boundaries”: Ruth Franklin (Anne Frank), moderator; Bill…

May 16, 2024
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Caro Research/Travel Fellowship

Varagur and Walsh named 2024 Caro Fellowship Recipients

Krithika Varagur and Keri Walsh are the winners of the 2024 Robert and Ina Caro Travel Fellowships for travel. They will receive $5,000 each for research trips to archives or important settings in their subjects’ lives. Varagur is at work on a group biography, The Singh Princesses: Three Sisters at the End of Empire, to be published by Penguin Press. Varagur will use the fellowship to make a research trip to Germany.   Keri Walsh is at work on Shakespeare and Company: The Paris Bookstore that Changed the World, a dual biography of the bookstore’s proprietors, Sylvia Beach and George Whitman, which will be published by Scribner. Walsh will use the fellowship funds to conduct research in Paris.   The 2024 Caro Travel Fellowship Committee members were Carla Kaplan (chair), Marc Leepson, and Susan Page.             

May 16, 2024
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