Biographers International Organization

This week we interview John Markoff, a Pulitzer Prize winning, veteran science and technology journalist for The New York Times , the Pacific News Service, InfoWorld , Byte Magazine , and The San Jose Mercury . Markoff also has shared his journalistic skills as a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism, and as an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford Graduate Pro...

This week we interview Alejandro Madrid, an award-winning Cornell University musicologist who specializes in music and expressive culture from Latin America and Latinxs in the United States. He has authored more than a half dozen books, including his latest, Tania Léon’s Stride. A Polyrhythmic Life, published by the University of Illinois Press in December 2021. Tania Léon, now in her late 7...

This week we interview Paulina Bren, an award-winning writer and Vassar College historian. Her latest book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free is a New York Times Editor’s Choice. The Barbizon has received international press coverage and it has been optioned by HBO and Game of Thrones ’ Emilia Clarke. Foreign rights have been sold to Italy, Spain, Hungary, South America, China, Russia an...

This week we interview Sheena Harris, a Woodburn Associate Professor of history and coordinator of the Africana Studies Program at West Virginia University. Previously, she served as an Associate Professor of history and the Inaugural Director of Student Engagement Initiatives at Tuskegee University. She is a first-time biographer and author of Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a C...

This week we interview Tyrone McKinley Freeman, an award-winning associate professor of Philanthropic Studies and director of undergraduate programs at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. His latest book, Madam C.J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy During Jim Crow , was published by the University of Illinois Press in September 2020. His work has appeared...

This week we interview biographer and historian, Debby Applegate. Her first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher , won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. This book also was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review , NPR’s Fresh Air...

Happy New Year! This week we interview Gary Ginsberg, author of The New York Times bestseller, First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (and Unelected) People Who Shaped Out Presidents , published by Twelve in July 2021. The book explores nine select American presidents (Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bi...

This week we offer the next episode in a special mini-series featuring highlights from panel discussions conducted during BIO’s first virtual annual conference, held May 14-16, 2021. The session, Writing the First Biography of Your Subject, featured biographers Justin Gifford ( Revolution or Death: The Life of Eldridge Cleaver ), Abigail Santamaria ( Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated...

This week we offer the next episode in a special mini-series featuring highlights from panel discussions conducted during BIO’s first virtual annual conference, held May 14-16, 2021. The session, The Art and Technology of Interviewing, featured authors John Brady ( The Art of Interviewing ), Claudia Dreifus ( Interview ; The New York Times’ Scientific Conversations: Interviews on Science ) and Bri...

This week we offer the next episode in a special mini-series featuring highlights from panel discussions conducted during BIO’s first virtual annual conference, held May 14-16, 2021. The session, “How to Pay For It, Or Funding Your Biography,” featured biographer Carla Kaplan ( Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance ), Steve Hindle of California’s Hun...

This week we offer the next episode in a special mini-series featuring highlights from panel discussions conducted during BIO’s first virtual annual conference, held May 14-16, 2021. The session, “Researching Under-Documented Lives, featured biographers Gaiutra Bahadur ( Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture ), Channing Gerald Joseph and Pamela Newkirk ( Spectacle: The Astonishing Lif...

This week we offer the first in a mini-series of special episodes featuring highlights from panel discussions conducted during BIO’s first virtual annual conference, held May 14-16, 2021. The session, Swipe Right for your Subject: How Do You Know It’s the Right One? , featured biographer Mary V. Dearborn ( Ernest Hemingway: A Biography ), long time book editor Gerald Howard and biograp...

This week we interview veteran Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and writer, Daniel de Visé. Exploring the life and times of a legendary guitarist and singer, his latest biography, King of the Blues, The Rise and Reign of B.B. King , was published by Grove Press in October 2021. De Visé’s previous books include biographies of actors Andy Griffin and Don Knotts ( Andy & Don , Simo...

In this week’s episode, we interview David Hajdu and John Carey, collaborators on a biography in graphic form about three vaudeville stars. A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay and Julian Eltinge was published Columbia University Press in September 2021. David Hajdu is a biographer, cultural historian, novelist, and songwriter. His previous biographies i...

In this week’s episode we interview Ty Seidule, author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause , published by St. Martin’s Press in January 2021. Seidule served in the U.S. Army for thirty-six years, retiring as a brigadier general in 2020. Also, he is a Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, where he taught for two decades. Seidule...

In this week’s episode, we interview Kevin McGruder, 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 non...

In this week’s episode, we interview journalist Molly Ball, author of  The New York Times  bestseller  Pelosi , a biography of the first woman to serve as the U.S. Congress’ Speaker of the House. Pelosi was published in May 2020 by Henry Holt. Molly Ball is  Time magazine’s national political correspondent and a frequent television and radio commentator. She has received numerous awards for her po...

In this week’s episode we interview Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Professor of Biography and English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Working with 19 other authors, her book of edited biographies, Britain’s Black Past, was published by Liverpool University Press in March 2020.  She also has published nine other books, including Carrington: A Life; Black London: Life Before Emancipation;...

In this week’s episode, we interview Tamara Payne. Working with her late father, the  award-winning and New York-based print journalist Les Payne, Tamara Payne co-wrote 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. Tamara Pay...

In this week’s episode, we interview Dinyar Patel, history professor at the S. B. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai, India, and the author of Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, published in May 2020 by Harvard University Press. Dinyar Patel was interviewed in his Mumbai home on July 15, 2021, via Zoom by writer and BIO member Sonja Williams.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She also is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the Anisfield-Wolf Nonfiction Book Award. Gordon-Reed lives in New York and Cambridge, and her latest book, On Juneteenth, was publi...

In this week’s episode, we interview Stephen Budiansky, a veteran historian, biographer, and journalist who has published 15 books, including his current biography, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel, published by W.W. Norton & Company in May 2021. His writing also has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and he is a...

In this week’s episode, we interview Kerri Greenidge, author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter , published November 19, 2019, by Liveright/Norton. Greenidge was interviewed via Zoom on June 28, 2021, by writer and BIO member Sonja Williams.   Photo by Matthew Guillory

In this week’s episode, we interview Raquel Ramsey and Tricia Aurand, co-authors of Taking Flight: The Nadine Ramsey Story, published in September 2020 by the University of Kansas Press. Ramsey is a retired Beverly Hills High School teacher and ESL coordinator. She also is the widow of Col. Edwin P. Ramsey, a decorated World War II hero. Aurand is an award-winning screenwriter, media critic, and p...

In this week’s episode, we interview Patrick Parr, author of One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation, published March 2021 by Chicago Review Press. Parr’s narrative is a day-by-day examination of a week that began with President Lyndon B. Johnson announcement that he would not seek re-election and ended with the fallout created by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr....