Adam Shatz, whose biography of Frantz Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January of 2024, was a awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the General Nonfiction category.

 The Biographers International Organization has awarded former LLCB Fellow Krithika Varagur a Robert and Ina Caro Travel/Research Fellowship for her group biography The Singh Princesses: Three Sisters at the End of Empire.

Kai Bird has been awarded the 2024 BIO Award, an honor bestowed annually by the Biographers International Organization, to a distinguished colleague who has made significant contributions to the art and craft of biography.

Former Biography Fellow Justin Gifford was awarded a 2024 National Endowment for the Humanties grant for his new biography-in-process, Time Considered as a Helix: The Life of Samuel R. Delany.

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation announced the recipients of the third annual Silvers-Dudley Prizes, which recognize “outstanding achievement in literary criticism, arts writing, and journalism.” Former Fellow Krithika Varagur (2022 – 2023), along with Fintan O’Toole, was awarded a prize for her journalism, which recognizes “achievement in reporting, long-form political analysis, or commentary.” 

Kai Bird, an American author and columnist, speaks in opposition of the motion that This House would press the Red Button. Mr Bird recounts Robert Oppenheimer's own failure to convince President Harry Truman and General Eisenhower of the dangers of unchecked nuclear proliferation.

Former Fellow Nicholas Boggs was awarded a Whiting Award in Nonfiction for his biography of James Baldwin.

Drawing on extensive archival material newly brought to light by the author, James Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, Black American painter Beauford Delaney; his lover and muse, Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and his collaborators, famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac. For the first time, this biography shows how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, aesthetic, and erotic—and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and Black and queer literary history.

American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer by Executive Director Kai Bird and Marty Sherwin, first published in 2006, has become an international bestseller on the heels of being used as the basis for Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film Oppenheimer. Profiles of Bird have appeared in the New York Times Magazine (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/books/oppenheimer-american-prometheus-sherwin-bird.html) and he has published a number of articles related to the film and book, most notably in the New Yorker and the New York Times.

From Publisher’s Weekly: “Scribner v-p and executive editor Rick Horgan bought world rights to Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn and the World He Made for mid-six figures in a five-house auction. Bird is a coauthor of American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize–winning 2005 biography of Robert J. Oppenheimer. Scribner described American Scoundrel as a portrait of the titular “super-lawyer, fixer, and gossip-fixated social networker” who was a mentor to Donald Trump. The book will be ‘especially intriguing in what it lays bare about the lessons Trump learned watching Cohn intimidate others, but, implicitly, it will also ask important questions about a dark vein in the American character that Cohn was the embodiment of and that has only become more prominent in the years since his death.’ Bird was represented in the deal by Gail Ross at Ross Yoon Literary, and American Scoundrel is slated for 2025.”

Congratulations to Jane Kamensky, Abigail Santamaria and Avi Steinberg, who recently received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Current Leon Levy Fellow Kamensky for her work on a life of Candida Royalle, Former Fellow Santamaria for her continued work on a biography of Madeleine L’Engle, and Current Fellow Steinberg for his work on a life of Grace Paley.

Congratulations to Jane Kamensky, Abigail Santamaria and Avi Steinberg, who recently received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Current Leon Levy Fellow Kamensky for her work on a life of Candida Royalle, Former Fellow Santamaria for her continued work on a biography of Madeleine L’Engle, and Current Fellow Steinberg for his work on a life of Grace Paley.

Gayatri Patnaik will receive BIO’s 2020 Editorial Excellence Award on Monday evening, November 9, at an online event featuring three of her authors: Imani Perry, Marcus Rediker, and Jeanne Theoharis, joined by literary agent Tanya McKinnon.

Patnaik is Associate Director and Editorial Director of Beacon Press, where for 18 years she has edited and published many books on race, ethnicity, and immigration. A native of India who emigrated with her family to the United States as a child, she has focused on African American history, creating Beacon’s “ReVisioning American History” series and its “Queer Action / Queer Ideas” series.

On Sunday, September 6, 2020, at 3pm ET, on its American History TV, C-SPAN3 will televise Nancy Greenspan discussing the life of nuclear spy Klaus Fuchs with Executive Director, Kai Bird. This discussion was originally broadcast on August 6, 2020 at 6 pm on Crowdcast.

Former Leon Levy Center Fellow Eric K. Washington’s Boss of the Grips: the Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal (Liveright, 2019) has won the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York history. Congratulations, Eric!

Channing Joseph was awarded a prestigious Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for his in-progress biography, House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens.

The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction.

House of Swann is the story of William Dorsey Swann, an African-American man born into slavery who became the world’s first self-described “drag queen” and the leader of possibly the world’s earliest-known gay liberation organization. In the 1880s and ’90s, Swann inspired a rebellious group of black butlers, coachmen, and cooks — most of them former slaves as well — to create a secret world of balls in Washington, D.C., risking their lives and livelihoods before there were any legal or political organizations willing to come to their defense, and nearly a century before the Stonewall Riots. House of Swann will be published by Crown.