News & Media

Latest News

News, organizational updates, awards, fellowships, and more from BIO and the wider biography community.

Filter By:
News

Spring Books - 2013

  JANUARY Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship by John B. Radner (Yale University Press) The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist by Matthew Kadane (Yale University Press) Ravel by Roger Nichols (Yale University Press) George II: King and Elector by Andrew C. Thompson (Yale University Press) Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life by Robert Milder (Oxford University Press) The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine—Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary by Jenny Uglow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor by Adrian Fort (St. Martin's Press) The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures by Edward Ball (Doubleday) Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens by Richard Seymour (Verso) Lee Marvin: Point Blank by Dwayne Epstein (Schaffner Press, Inc.) The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis (Beacon Press) Davis McCaughey: A Life by Sarah Martin (University of New South Wales Press) Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII by Robert A. Ventresca (Belknap Press) Congressman Lincoln by Chris DeRose (Threshold Editions) Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America by Roy Morris (Belknap Press) FEBRUARY Ike and Dick: Portrait of a…

February 5, 2013
Read more about Spring Books - 2013
Conference

Compleat Biographer Conference Program Set;
Registration to Open Soon

The 2013 Compleat Biographer conference, scheduled for May 17 through May 19 in New York City, will include 20 panels, three or four on-site research workshops, and four master classes, according to program committee chair Brian Jay Jones. “The program committee has put together an outstanding lineup of subjects for the conference,” said BIO vice president Jones. “There will be not-to-missed panels for all biographers, seasoned professionals as well as those just starting.” The preliminary list of panels includes such topics as Getting (Too) Close to Your Subject, the Politics of Blurbs and Reviews, Beginnings and Endings, Biography for Your Audiences, the Art of the Partial Biography, University Presses, Lesser-Known Relatives, Writing the African-American Biography, and Biography on Film. The latter panel will include a screening of a biographical film about Father Michael Lapsley by Melvin McCray, a longtime editor at ABC News. As with each conference, the keynote address will be given by that year’s BIO Award winner. The 2013 winner will be announced in the January 2013 issue of TBC. Past winners have been Jean Strouse, Robert Caro, and Arnold Rampersad. The Friday of the conference weekend will feature research workshops at leading libraries and archives in New…

December 27, 2012
Read more about Compleat Biographer Conference Program Set;
Registration to Open Soon
News

All In: Biographers React to the Petraeus-Broadwell Affair

Readers rarely come across articles on the craft or ethics of biography in the mainstream media. There are some exceptions, of course: the publication earlier this year of the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography drew major coverage in such periodicals as Esquire and Newsweek, and Caro was interviewed on CBS’s Sunday Morning. Last month, we saw another exception to this rule. When subject and writer have an affair and that affair leads to a public scandal for the subject—a revered popular figure—the ethics of biography soar to the media forefront. Most TBC readers are by now well aware of the details of the Paula Broadwell–David Petraeus relationship. Their affair, which took place while Broadwell was writing a biography of the CIA head and highly regarded general, sparked a speedy comedown for one of the most influential and powerful public figures of the past decade. More important to BIO members, it publicly raised the professional and ethical dilemmas biographers can face. Those dilemmas go beyond the sexual; Broadwell may have broken the law with the way she handled classified information, though she is unlikely to face any charges. With the revelation of the affair, some reviewers’ comments about…

December 27, 2012
Read more about All In: Biographers React to the Petraeus-Broadwell Affair
Conference

2013 BIO Conference Set for NYC

The program committee of Biographers International Organization, acting on the recommendation of the site committee, just announced that the fourth annual Compleat Biographer Conference will be held from May 17 through May 19, 2013, in New York City. The committee is still hashing out details for the conference site and the panels to be offered, as well as pre- and post-conference events; Hurricane Sandy delayed finalizing the conference site selection. BIO president James McGrath Morris had nothing but high praise for the decision, saying the New York location should make this conference the best yet. “The response to holding it in New York City has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said. “Editors and agents are lining up to join us. Our conference has a reputation as one of the finest gatherings of writers in the country, and they won’t miss out on attending the meeting when it’s held in their backyard.” Morris added that biographers from as far away as South America plan to attend because of the ease of reaching the city. “I’m betting that for the first time we will have to limit attendance.” The program committee is chaired by BIO vice president Brian Jay Jones. Serving with him…

November 14, 2012
Read more about 2013 BIO Conference Set for NYC
News

Massie Embraces the Story

by New York Correspondent Dona Munker Robert K. Massie, a journalist and historian whose gift for vivid narrative has made him the preeminent American biographer of Russian royals, makes his job sound easy. “I am a storyteller,” he explains modestly, adding that he writes biography because “telling stories about peoplpe in the past is important to everyone trying to understand who we are and where we come from.” Massie’s remarks came as part of the fifth annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture, held last month at the CUNY Graduate Center. The talk followed his recent winning of the 2012 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for Catherine the Great: A Woman’s Life. Among his other literary successes, Massie’s life of Peter the Great won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, while Nicholas and Alexandra was a durable New York Times bestseller. Massie told the audience that the biographer whose aim is to “fully embrace the story being told” will find himself working with three key ingredients. The first of these, he said, is relevance. The reader must have the sense that the life under study is important because it is “part of a chain that affects his own life.” This sense of connection…

November 5, 2012
Read more about Massie Embraces the Story