BIO invites participants at all levels of interest in the craft of biography to participate in three forums led by prize-winning biographers
About this Event

Biographers International Organization (BIO) is excited to announce Biography Lab 2025, its third annual online forum, which will be held via Zoom on Saturday, January 18, 2025, from 10:30 am – 5:00 pm EST. BIO invites participants at all levels of interest and experience in the craft of biography to participate in three sequential 90-minute forums led by prominent biographers and people in publishing. A social hour concludes the day. The distinguished keynote speaker will be John A. Farrell, the author of books about four towering American figures, Richard Nixon, Ted Kennedy, Clarence Darrow and Tip O’Neill. The three forum leaders will be Jean Strouse, author of three landmark biographies; Susan Leon, an independent editor of biography and other genres with experience at three trade houses; and Yunte Huang, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose most recent biography is of the actress Anna May Wong. BIO Lab 2025 Chair: Kate Buford

Registration: Free to BIO members and students; $60 for nonmembers (fee includes a year’s BIO membership).

What to Expect: Forum leaders will present on a specific issue of craft followed by questions and discussion with participants. The presentations will be recorded but not the discussion sessions in order to protect the privacy of participants.

Schedule (Please note that all times are U.S. Eastern Standard Time):

John A. Farrell, Is Biography still Relevant in the Age of X, Trump and Truthiness? (The keynote address is prerecorded and can be viewed any time after 8:00 a.m.)

10:30 – noon: Jean Strouse, Three Wildly Different Stories

Noon – 12:30: Break

12:30 – 2:00: Susan Leon, The Art of Great Biography: Reflections from across an Editor’s Desk

2:00 – 2:15: Break

2:15 – 3:45: Yunte Huang, The Chinese Art of Biographical Writing

4:00 – 5:00: Social Hour

Keynote Speaker

John A. Farrell (www.jafarrell.com) is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life, which won the PEN America award for the best biography, and the New-York Historical Society book prize for the best volume of American history of 2017. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His new book: Ted Kennedy: A Life, made the list of finalists for the National Book Award. Farrell graduated “With Distinction” from the University of Virginia, and has a PhD in history from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In 2001 he published Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century, which won the Hardeman prize for the best book on Congress. His book, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, won the Los Angeles Times book award for best biography of 2012. He has also earned a George Polk award, and the Gerald Ford prize and White House Correspondents honors for his coverage of the presidency.

Forum Leaders

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan, American Financier, and Alice James, A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Newsweek, and other publications. Strouse has been a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, and served as Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2003 to 2017. Her new book, Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, has just been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Susan Leon is an independent editor who worked in the Literary Department of the William Morris Agency and held senior editorial positions at Atheneum/Scribner and William Morrow before opening her own editorial consulting business. With graduate degrees in American history, she specializes in history, biography and memoir, but also edits general fiction. She has edited several New York Times bestsellers and award-winning titles; authors she has worked with include Sir Martin Gilbert, Diane Ackerman, Kay Redfield Jamison, Steve Coll, and Julian Zelizer. A featured panelist at Book Expo America, she served as a grant evaluator for the NEH Public Scholars Program in the area of American history. The most recent biography she has edited is a forthcoming life of the businessman and philanthropist Nathan Strauss (Rutgers University Press 2025).

Yunte Huang is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Charlie Chan (Norton, 2010), which won the Edgar Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His Inseparable (Liveright, 2018), also a finalist for the NBCC award, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, and Newsweek. He has published articles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, PMLA, and others, and has been featured on NPR, CBS, BBC, C-SPAN, and others. His new book, the third and final installment of his “Rendezvous with America” trilogy, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History, was published by Liveright in 2023 and named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.