Biographers International Organization

This week we interview Rachel Jamison Webster, professor of creative writing at Northwestern University and the author of four books of poetry and cross-genre writing. Her latest book, Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family, was published by Henry Holt and Company in March 2023.  Webster has taught writing workshops through the National Urban League, Chicago Public Scho...

This week we interview David Waldstreicher, a history professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and author of his latest book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: a Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence, published by Farrar Strauss and Grioux in March 2023. Waldstreicher’s other books includer Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification, and Runaway...

This week we interview Tanisha C. Ford, a cultural critic, educator, and author. Her latest book, Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon, and the Glamour, Money and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement, was published by Amistad in October 2023. Ford has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time, the Root, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and she’s been featured on NPR, among other places. She was named...

This week we interview Dean King whose latest book, Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite, was published by Scribner in March 2023. King is an award-winning author of ten nonfiction books including Skeletons on the Zahara, Unbound, Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, and The Feud. His writing has appeared in Granta, Garden & Gun, National Geographic Adventure,...

This week we interview Brad Snyder, author of Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment, published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2022. As a Georgetown University law professor, Snyder teaches constitutional law, constitutional history, and sports law. He was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in constitutional studies, and he is a member of the...

This week we interview Yunte Huang, a Guggenheim Fellow and author of Daughter of the  Dragon:  Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History, published by Liveright in August 2023. Huang has taught at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor of English. He also is the author of Inseparable and the Edgar Award–winning biography Charlie Chan. Bo...

Happy New Year! This special episode features a fascinating presentation by the 2023 National Humanities Awardee, Tulane University history professor, television and podcast host, and celebrated biographer, Walter Issacson. His September 28, 2023, “Lessons About Living with Genius,” lecture was presented at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in the Graduate Center of the City University of New Yor...

This week, we interview author Justin Martin, who specializes in meticulously researched and engagingly delivered American history books. His most recent, A Fierce Glory: Antietam, the Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery, was published by Da Capo Press in September 2018. This group biography is about Antietam—a turning point in the Civil War—in which Martin emphasizes character...

This week, we interview Maryemma Graham, author of the first comprehensive biography of famed poet, writer, and educator Margaret Walker. The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker was published by Oxford University Press in December 2022. A Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Kansas and Founding Director of the History of Black Writing at the University of Miss...

This week, we interview Beverly Gage, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century , published by Viking in November 2022. Gage is professor of 20th-century American history at Yale and in her previous book, The Day Wall Street Exploded (Oxford University Press, 2009), she examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centur...

This week we interview Satvinder Juss, author of Bhagat Singh: A Life in Revolution , a biography of a charismatic Indian revolutionary, published by India Viking in December 2022. Juss serves as Professor of Law at King’s College, London; is a practicing Barrister-at-Law in London; and is a Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal in London and Birmingham, UK. He was a former Human Rights Fellow at Har...

This week we interview Rachel L. Swarns, a New York University Professor of Journalism and journalist who writes about race and race relations as a contributing author to The New York Times. Her latest book, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the Catholic Church , was published by Random House in May 2023. She also authored American Tapestry: The Story of the Black and White...

This week we interview Edward O’Shea, a State University of New York at Oswego Emeritus English Professor and author of Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey. Published by Routledge Press in December 2022, this biography explores the 40 years that Irish poet Seamus Heaney spent in America. O’Shea has served as a Fulbright Fellow at Presidency College in Kolkata, India, and he was a Fulbright Specialist...

This week we interview Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. In her latest book, Mina Loy: Apology of Genius, published by Reaktion Books in July 2022, Caws explores Loy’s flamboyant life and avant-garde artistry. Caws has authored several books, including The Modern Art Cookbook and C...

This week we interview the internationally renowned cosmologist Thomas Hertog, who for many years was a close collaborator and mentee of the late Stephen Hawking. His book, On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory, was published by Bantam in April 2023. Hertog currently serves as professor of theoretical physics at Belgium’s University of Leuven, where he studies the quantum nature of...

This week we interview Ilyon Woo, the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, published by Simon & Schuster in January 2023. This biography details the story of Ellen and William Craft who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise. Woo also authored The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary...

This week we feature award-winning journalist and author Caleb Gayle, who writes about the history of race and identity. His latest book, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity and Power (Riverhead Books, June 2023), is about Black members of the indigenous Creek Nation. It was awarded the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award. Gayle’s writing has appeared in The New...

This week we feature biographer and cultural historian Paul Fisher. His most recent award-winning biography, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World , was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2022. Fisher currently serves as an American Studies Professor at Wellesley College; he has also taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Boston University, and Harvard. His group biography, House o...

This week we feature Angela V. John, an historian and biographer from Wales who serves as the president of Llafur, the Welsh People’s History Society. Her latest book, War, Journalism, and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson , was published by Bloomsbury in February of this year. It examines the life of a journalist who has been called the “king” of corres...

This week we feature Jonathan Eig, former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal and the author of a new biography of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.— King: A Life (Farrar Straus and Giroux, May 2023). Eig is a New York Times bestselling author of five previous books including: Ali: A Life (Mariner Books, 2017); Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (Simon & Schuster, 2005); an...

This week we interview Kerri K. Greenidge, the Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. The author most recently of The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family (Liveright, November 2022), Greenidge also wrote Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019), one of The New York Times ’...

This week we interview Celia Stahr, author of Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist (St. Martin’s Press, March 2020). This biography of celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s formative time during the early 1930s in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York, received many positive reviews in publications such as The New York Times , Art in America , and Booklist . Stahr teaches ar...

This week we interview Jonny Steinberg, author of Winnie and Nelson Mandela: Portrait of a Marriage, published by Knopf in May 2023. Steinberg has written several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and he is a two-time winner of South Africa’s premier nonfiction award and an inaugural winner of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize. Ste...

This week we interview Sung-Yoon Lee, author of The Sister: The Extraordinary Story of Kim Yo Jong, the Most Powerful Woman in North Korea , published in America by Public Affairs in September of this year. A fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Lee has taught Korean history at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. Sung-Yoon Lee is interviewed by BIO member Jennifer Sko...

This special episode features a spirited conversation between award-winning journalist and biographer Pamela Newkirk and BIO’s 2023 Plutarch Award-winner Jennifer Homans. The Plutarch Award recognizes the best biography of the year, as determined by a BIO committee of distinguished biographers. Homans earned this honor for her latest book, Mr. B.: Balanchine’s 20th Century (Random House, November...