Biographers International Organization

By Biographers International OrganizationSociety & Culture Education Arts

Biographers International Organization episodes

April 04, 2025 Podcast #211 – Heather Clark & Stephen Enniss
These guests talk about the awards that BIO offers for biographers. Heather Clarks is an author, literary critic and chair of BIO’s awards committee. Her most recent book, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, was one of the New York Times Ten Best Books (2021), and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, along with Guggenheim, NYPL Cullman Center, NEH Public Scholars, and Leon Levy Biography fellowships. BIO’s 2024 Biblio Award winner and biographer Stephen Enniss, heads the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He has brought scores of archives to the University of Texas, including those of Nobel Laureates Gabriel García Márquez and Kazuo Ishiguro. Enniss is a past recipient of the University of London’s Leverhulme Fellowship and the author of After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon. Heather Clark and Stephen Enniss were interviewed by BIO member and podcast producer Jenny Skoog.

28 min
March 28, 2025 Podcast #210 – Linda Leavell & Natalie Dykstra
These pivotal BIO members share their experience as co-chairs of BIO’s June 5-6, 2025 annual conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Linda Leavell served as BIO’s president from 2019 to 2023, and her biography of American poet Marianne Moore, Holding On Upside Down, won BIO’s Plutarch Award for the best biography of the year, the PEN award for biography, and the Modernist Studies Association book award. With fellow biographer, professor emerita and Massachusetts Historical Society fellow Natalie Dykstra, Leavell co-organized BIO’s inaugural Biography Lab in 2023. Natalie Dykstra’s biography, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, won a NEH Fellowship and she was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award. For her recent book, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Dykstra received a NEH Public Scholars grant and BIO’s inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship. Linda Leavell and Natalie Dykstra were interviewed by BIO member and podcast producer Jenny Skoog.
27 min
March 21, 2025 Podcast #209 – James McGrath Morris
In this special episode, BIO’s former president and one of the organization’s founders, talks about the history of BIO and its influence. In 2019 McGrath Morris received the BIO Award, annually presented to a writer who has made a major contribution to the advancement of the art and craft of biography. His award-winning books have included Tony Hillerman: A Life; The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and A Friendship Made and Lost in War; Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press; Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power; The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism, and, Jailhouse Journalism: The Four Estate Behind Bars. He is also the author of the Kindle Singles Revolution by Murder: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Plot to Kill Henry Clay Frick. and The Radio Operator: Robert Ford’s Last Stand in the Fight to Save Tibet. James “Jamie” McGrath Morris was interviewed by BIO member and podcast producer Jenny Skoog.
22 min
March 14, 2025 Podcast #208 – Ray Anthony Shepard
This award-winning author of biographers for young readers talks about his writing career and his long-term service as a founding BIO board member. His most recent book, A Long Time Coming: A Lyrical Biography of Race in America From Ona Judge to Barack Obama, was published by Calkins Creek in August 2023. Shepard initiated and organized BIO’s exciting forthcoming regional conference, Telling the Stories of Black Lives through Biography. Scheduled for March 21-22, 2025, this conference will be held at Troy University in Montgomery, Alabama, and it will feature a host of speakers, panel discussions, museum tours, and receptions. Ray Anthony Shepard was interviewed by BIO member and podcast producer Jenny Skoog.

21 min
March 07, 2025 Podcast #207 – Jared Stearns
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.

31 min
February 28, 2025 Podcast #206 – Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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.
30 min
February 21, 2025 Podcast #205 – Mary Frances Phillips
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.
28 min
February 14, 2025 Podcast #204 – Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
This award-winning archaeologist, author and scholar talks about her latest book, Apostle of Liberation: AME Bishop Paul Quinn and the Underground Railroad. Published by Rowman and Littlefield this month, this biography explores the life of a larger-than-life leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church – a man who actively supported the education of enslaved Black Americans and their freedom struggles during and after slavery. LaRoche also authored Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance, and she is an associate research professor in Historic Preservation in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland. Cheryl LaRoche was interviewed by fellow biographer and BIO member Kevin McGruder.

31 min
February 07, 2025 Podcast #203 – Samantha Ege
This award-winning musicologist, internationally recognized concert pianist, and London-based popular public speaker talks about her first book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene, published by the University of Illinois Press in November 2024. Ege is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, and she is a leading scholar of African American composer Florence B. Price within the context of the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930-1950) and Black women’s dynamic networks of advocacy, empowerment, and uplift. In 2018, Ege released her debut album, Four Women, featuring the music of pioneering women composers Price, Margaret Bonds, Carol Kapralova, and Ethel Bilsland, and she has released several critically acclaimed albums since then. Samantha Ege was interviewed by fellow biographer and BIO member Sonja Williams.

29 min
January 31, 2025 Podcast #202 – Diane Kiesel
Author, professor and retired New York Supreme Court judge, Diane Kiesel, talks about her latest book, When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law. It is set to be published in February 2025 by the University of Michigan Press. While serving as a judge, Kiesel continued her career as a writer of non-fiction that began years before when she was a journalist in Washington, D.C. where she reported on Congress and the Supreme Court for several California newspapers. Kiesel has authored two editions of a textbook on domestic violence law, and an award-winning biography of Dr. Dorothy Boulding, a civil rights pioneer. Diane Kiesel was interviewed by fellow biographer and BIO member Debby Applegate.

31 min