![]() The BIO logo | |
Formation | 2010 |
---|---|
Type | 501(c)3 organization |
Purpose | BIO promotes the art and craft of biography, and furthers the professional interests of its practitioners. |
Headquarters | Santa Fe, NM |
Region served | International |
Membership | Approx. 500 members |
Founder | James McGrath Morris [1] |
President | Linda Leavell |
Executive Director | Michael Gately |
Website | www.biographersinternational.org |
Biographers International Organization (BIO) is an international, non-profit, 501 (c)(3) organization founded to promote the art and craft of biography, and to further the professional interests of its practitioners. The organization was founded in 2010 by a committee of noted biographers, led by James McGrath Morris, who served as BIO's first Executive Director. The president of BIO as of 2019 is Linda Leavell. The executive director as of 2020 is Michael Gately.
Each year, the organization presents its highest award, the BIO Award, to an individual who has made notable contributions to advancing the art and craft of biography. [2] BIO's annual Plutarch Award is given to the best biography of the year – as judged by biographers. [3]
BIO aims to promote the art and craft of biography, cultivate a diverse community of biographers, encourage public interest in biography, and provide educational and fellowship opportunities that support the work of biographers worldwide. [4]
BIO fulfills its mission by:
BIO was granted its corporate charter on May 26, 2010, as a 501 (c) 6. On December 27, 2019, BIO became a 501 (c) 3.
BIO grew from the vision of biographer James McGrath Morris, creator and editor of The Biographer's Craft newsletter. In July 2008, Morris wrote an open letter to biographers, [6] from which a grass-roots organization of practicing and apprentice biographers began to emerge. On March 26, 2009, the first formal organizing meeting took place at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY, and a temporary 15-member founding committee was formed to function as an Interim Board of Directors.
In February 2010, the Interim Board announced the formation of an Advisory Council composed of leading and noted biographers and agents. The current Advisory Council includes Debby Applegate, Taylor Branch, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, Tim Duggan, John A. Farrell, Michael Holroyd, Peniel Joseph, Hermione Lee, Andrew Lownie, Megan Marshall, John Matteson, Jon Meacham, Marion Meade, Candice Millard, James McGrath Morris, Andrew Morton, Arnold Rampersad, Hans Renders, Stacy Schiff, Martin J. Sherwin, Gayfryd Steinberg, Will Swift, William Taubman, Terry Teachout, and Claire Tomalin.
BIO convened its first conference in May 2010, at the University of Massachusetts Boston. It has since held its conference annually, at various locations in the United States, including Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles.
Each year, BIO presents several awards to honor biographers, editors, librarians and archivists, and their work.
Year | BIO Award | Biblio Award | Plutarch Award | Editorial Excellence |
---|---|---|---|---|
2010 | Jean Strouse | |||
2011 | Robert Caro | |||
2012 | Arnold Rampersad | Edward Comstock, University of Southern California | ||
2013 | Ron Chernow | David Smith, New York Public Library | Robert Caro, The Passage of Power | |
2014 | Stacy Schiff | Wallace Dailey and Heather Cole, Curators Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard University | Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore | Robert Gottlieb |
2015 | Taylor Branch | Thomas Mann, Library of Congress | Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life | Jonathan Segal |
2016 | Claire Tomalin | Dave Grabarek, Library of Virginia | Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva | Nan A. Talese |
2017 | Candice Millard | Karen Alder Abramson & Staff | Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life | Robert Weil |
2018 | Richard Holmes | Michael T. Ryan, VP & Director Patricia J. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society | Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder | Tim Duggan |
2019 | James McGrath Morris [7] | Nancy Kuhl, [8] Curator of Poetry Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library | David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | Ileene Smith |
2020 | Hermione Lee | (No award presented due to COVID-19) | Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II | Gayatri Patnaik |
2021 | David Levering Lewis | Jeff Flannery, Reference and Reader Services Section in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress | A. N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens | Bob Bender |
2022 | Megan Marshall | Claudia Anderson, The LBJ Presidential Library | Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence. | Gerald Howard |
2023 | Kitty Kelley | David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States | Jennifer Homans, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century. | Michael Korda |
2024 | Kai Bird | Stephen Enniss, Harry Ransom Center | Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World. | |
The Biographer's Craft is a monthly online newsletter that active BIO members receive as part of their membership. TBC features original, non-fiction articles of general interest to biographers, writers, and readers of biography. Regular features include interviews with notable biographers, and a listing of biographies sold to publishers, as well as biographies published each month. BIO also publishes a quarterly online newsletter that promotes biography and the organization to members of the publishing community.
The current editor of The Biographer's Craft is Holly Van Leuven.
At the first conference in Boston on May 15, 2010, [9] Nigel Hamilton was chosen to assume the presidency, succeeding Debby Applegate, who had served as interim president. Charles J. Shields was elected vice president, and eleven others were selected to serve one- to two-year terms on the board. In its first actions, the board selected James McGrath Morris to serve as executive director.
Since 2010, BIO's president and vice president have been elected biennially by BIO members. Its Board of Directors are broken into two groups, each of which are also elected biennially. The current Board is composed of 15 members, including the president and vice president.
Term | President | Vice President |
---|---|---|
2009 | Debby Applegate (interim) | None |
2010–2012 | Nigel Hamilton | Charles J. Shields |
2012–2014 | James McGrath Morris | Brian Jay Jones |
2014–2016 | Brian Jay Jones | Cathy Curtis |
2016–2018 | Will Swift | Deirdre David |
2018–2019 | Cathy Curtis | Deirdre David |
2019–2020 | Linda Leavell | Karin Roffman |
2020–2021 | Linda Leavell | Sarah S. Kilborne |
BIO offers varying levels of membership, depending on a member's professional status. BIO is open to professional, amateur, and aspiring biographers and documentarians around the world, and also permits membership for readers of biography, students and corporations. [10]
The Pulitzer Prizes are two dozen annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
Robert Allan Caro is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.
ACES: The Society for Editing is a professional association of international scope for editors who work on every kind of content, including newspapers, magazines, websites, books, scholarly journals, and corporate communications.
Ronald Chernow is an American writer, journalist, and biographer. He has written bestselling historical non-fiction biographies.
Arnold Rampersad is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The first volume (1986) of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.
Taylor Branch is an American author and historian who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning trilogy chronicling the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and much of the history of the American civil rights movement. The final volume of the 2,912-page trilogy, collectively called America in the King Years, was released in January 2006, and an abridgment, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, was published in 2013.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson by the American writer Robert Caro. Four volumes have been published, running to more than 3,000 pages in total, detailing Johnson's early life, education, and political career. A fifth volume is expected to deal with the bulk of Johnson's presidency and post-presidential years. The series is published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The Poetry Society of America is a literary organization founded in 1910 by poets, editors, and artists. It is the oldest poetry organization in the United States. Past members of the society have included such renowned poets as Witter Bynner, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens.
The Pulitzer Prizes for 1975, the 59th annual prizes, were ratified by the Pulitzer Prize advisory board on April 11, 1975, and by the trustees of Columbia University on May 5. For the first time, the role of accepting or rejecting recommendations of the advisory board was delegated by the trustees to the university's president, William J. McGill; the change was prompted by the desire of the trustees to distance themselves from the appearance of approval of controversial awards based on work involving what some considered to be illegal leaks, such as the 1972 Pulitzer Prize awarded for the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American former editor, essayist, and author of five biographies. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
Debby Applegate is an American historian and biographer. She is the author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age and The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher is a 2006 biography of the 19th-century American minister Henry Ward Beecher, written by Debby Applegate and published by Doubleday. The book describes Beecher's childhood, ministry, support for the abolition of slavery and other social causes, and widely publicized 1875 trial for adultery.
John Matteson is an American professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his first book, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.
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T. J. Stiles is an American biographer who lives in Berkeley, California. His book The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt won a National Book Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His book Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Charles J. Shields is an American biographer of mid-century American novelists and writers.
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James McGrath Morris is an American biographer.
Alexander Hamilton is a 2004 biography of American statesman Alexander Hamilton, written by biographer Ron Chernow. Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, was an instrumental promoter of the U.S. Constitution, founder of the nation's financial system, and its first Secretary of the Treasury.