This first-time biographer’s, Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers, explores the untold story of the world’s most famous X-rated star. Chambers rose to fame as the face of Ivory Snow laundry detergent and the star of the X-rated film, Behind the Green Door. Stearns’s book was published by Headpress in May 2024. As a former journalist, Jared Stearns currently serves as the editor of BIO’s newsletters, The Biographer’s Craft and The Insider, and he was interviewed by fellow biographer and BIO member Simon Read.

This scholar and author’s latest book, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in August 2024. As a queer Black feminist love evangelist, Gumbs has written four earlier books, including Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, which won the 2022 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. Gumbs is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry, the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a National Humanities Center Fellowship. She is currently working on her next book in honor of June Jordan and Fannie Lou Hamer. Alexis Pauline Gumbs was interviewed by fellow biographer and BIO member Tamara Payne. Both authors will appear at BIO’s Telling the Stories of Black Lives Through Biography, scheduled for March 21-22, 2025, in Montgomery, Alabama.

This historian and author’s Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins, was published in January 2025 by New York University Press. It examines the life and legacy of one of the longest-serving women members of the Black Panther Party. Huggins also is an educator, poet, mother, and a former political prisoner. As a first-time biographer, Mary Phillips serves as an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has published several scholarly journal articles, and her essays have appeared in the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine’s blog, New Black Man (in Exile), Colorlines, Vibe Magazine, and the Black Youth Project. Mary Frances Phillips was interviewed by fellow biographer and BIO member Sonja Williams.