Biographers International Organization

This week we interview Marsha Gordon, author, professor, and director of Film Studies at North Carolina State University. Gordon’s latest book, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, was published by the University of California Press in April 2023. Gordon is a former National Humanities Center Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar. Her other books include Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies, and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age. Gordon has co-directed three documentary shorts, and she recently received a 2024 Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship to work on her newest documentary about the visual artist Alexander Bogardy. Marsha Gordon was interviewed by fellow biographer and BIO member Debby Applegate.

This week we interview Adam Nagourney, veteran journalist and author of, The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn and the Transformation of Journalism, published by Crown Press in September 2023. After being hired by the New York Times in 1996, Nagourney served as the paper’s metropolitan political correspondent, chief national political correspondent, Los Angeles bureau chief, and West Coast culture reporter, returning to cover national politics in 2023. Before joining the Times, he worked at USA Today, The New York Daily News, and the Gannett Westchester Newspapers. Adam Nagourney was interviewed by BIO member and fellow biographer Lisa Napoli.

This week we interview award-winning author and first-time biographer, Barbara D. Savage. Her latest book, Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar, is an incisive examination of a scholar who thrived despite steep obstacles, taking her from a farm in the Midwest to Kalamazoo to London and to the world beyond. Merze Tate was published by Yale University Press in November 2023. Savage is a historian and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania. Her other works include Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, winner of the 2012 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Barbara D. Savage was interviewed by BIO member and fellow biographer A’Lelia Bundles.

This week we interview Judith Tick, a Matthews Distinguished Professor Emerita at Northeastern University in Boston, and an award-winning author. Her latest book, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song, explores the life of one of the 20th century’s greatest jazz vocalists. It was published by W. W. Norton and Company in January of this year. In addition, Tick’s co-edited anthology (with Jane Bowers), Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, was a pioneering text for the study of gender and women’s history in music. In 2013 the Society for American Music established a fellowship in Tick’s name. Judith Tick was interviewed by BIO member and fellow biographer Sonja Williams.

This week we interview celebrated author Hampton Sides. His latest book, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, was published by Doubleday in April 2024. Sides is known for his gripping nonfiction adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of exploration. His bestselling narratives include, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound On His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground. Sides has been a contributor to many national newspapers and magazines, and his journalistic work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. He is a board member of the Society of American Historians and the Author’s Guild, and he was a recent Miller Distinguished Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. Hampton Sides was interviewed by BIO member and fellow biographer Jamie McGrath Morris.

This week we interview Scott Shane, author of Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland. Published by Celadon Press in September 2023, Shane has written a riveting account of the life of Thomas Smallwood–the formerly enslaved man credited with naming the Underground Railroad. Shane is a veteran reporter for The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times, where he was twice a member of teams that won Pulitzer Prizes. His two previous books are Dismantling Utopia, a firsthand account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Objective Troy, the story of an American terrorist killed in a drone strike on orders of President Obama. In 2019-2020 he was a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught courses on media and about the Russian attack on the 2016 American presidential election. Scott Shane was interviewed by BIO member Jenny Skoog.

This week we interview award winning author Cynthia Carr, whose latest book, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in March 2024. Carr’s previous biographies include, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz – a Lambda Literary Award winner and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize – along with Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Cynthia Carr was interviewed by BIO member Jenny Skoog.