Stacy Schiff gave the inaugural Leon Levy Lecture on Biography, speaking on the process of researching and writing her biography Cleopatra: A Life, at the time a work-in-progress, published in 2010 by Little, Brown. Schiff is also the author of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, which won the 2005 George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the InstitutFrançais’s Gilbert Chinard Prize. She received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), published by Random House. Her first book, Saint-Exupéry, published by Knopf in 1994, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of numerous awards abroad.