Kai Bird, Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, has been selected by the Rockefeller Foundation as a Bellagio Center Resident in February 2026. This prestigious program has hosted thousands of artists, policymakers, scholars, authors, practitioners, and scientists from all over the world and across every discipline, including Maya Angelou, Dikgang Moseneke, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mary Robinson, and more. Bird will be working on his forthcoming biography of Roy Cohn, entitled, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.

Former fellow Avi Steinberg has been awarded a 2025 Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress for Grace Paley: A Life (to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a biography of Grace Paley, a critical figure in mid- and late-century American and Jewish-American literature, in the women’s liberation movement, in radical Left politics, and in the intersections between these streams. Drawing on unpublished archival material, new interviews, and the latest scholarship, this biography is the broadest investigation to date of Paley’s life and work.