Paper and Cinema
Gary Giddins in Conversation with Geoffrey C. Ward

Gary Giddins will speak with Geoffrey C. Ward, a writer who has uniquely made his mark in both the world of books and documentary films. Among his biographies are two volumes on the emergence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including A First-Class Temperament, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize, and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. He is also a five-time Emmy winner whose work is known to millions of Americans for having helped to revolutionize documentary filmmaking in such Ken Burns films as The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, Huey Long, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, and the recently televised Prohibition.

Click here to listen to a recording of the event.

Women Writing Women's Lives presents Works In Progress
"Sara Bard Field, Poet and Radical Suffragist: Parsing the Heart"
Speaker: Dona Munker

Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Women's Studies Certificate Program, Humanities Center, MA Program in Liberal Arts, and the PhD Programs in English and History

Dona Munker, a WWWL board member, is a writer and former book editor with a PhD in English literature. Her book, Daughter of Persia, a first-person account of the life of a modern Middle Eastern woman co-authored with her subject, Sattareh Farman-Farmaian, has been translated into five languages. In describing her current project, Sara and Erskine, an American Romance, she will discuss the detective work needed to reconstruct and depict the emotional experience of Sara Bard Field, a radical suffragist and poet, and address the larger implications of using an innovative approach in scholarly biography.

Click here to listen to a recording of the event.

September 21, 2011: The Fourth Annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture featuring Hilary Spurling

The Fourth Annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture will feature distinguished author Hilary Spurling. Born in 1940 and educated at Somerville College, Oxford University, Ms. Spurling has written biographies of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Paul Scott, Sonia Orwell and Henri Matisse in 2 volumes, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times biography prize in 2005. She is a CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and founder of the Royal Literary Society's Writers Fellowship scheme. Her latest book is Pearl Buck in China, of which The New York Times writes, "Hilary Spurling approaches Buck's life the way an art restorer approaches a serious but neglected painting. She clears away decades' worth of grime, repairs some buckling, smoothes out a bit of flaking craquelure. The resulting portrait ... has an absorbing glow."

May 12, 2011: Cornel West on Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work of the Graduate Center, and The Nation

Please join Cornel West, Stanley Aronowitz, Leith Mullings, and Gary Younge as they discuss Manning Marable's new biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention and the many questions about Malcolm X's life and assassination that it raises. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention has been widely praised as "a meticulous, comprehensive and fair-minded portrait of both Malcolm and the turbulent period of American history in which he lived and died." And, in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani writes that "Marable artfully strips away the layers and layers of myth that have been lacquered onto his subject's life."

Manning Marable, who died days before his book was released early this month, was a professor of African-American Studies at Columbia University and the founder of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies.

Cornel West, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, is the distinguished philosopher, activist, and critic who's written over twenty books, including the groundbreaking Race Matters, The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, and a recent memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud.

Stanley Aronowitz is Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work and Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a founding editor of the journal Social Text and co-founder and co-editor of Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. He has authored and editor more than twenty books including Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters (2008).

Leith Mullings, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and President-Elect of the American Anthropological Association is an activist whose research and writing on structures of inequality and resistance ranges from analyses of traditional medicine in Africa to the impact of illegal drugs, incarceration, and gentrification on urban communities in the United States. Her numerous publications include On Our Own Terms: Race, Class and Gender in the Lives of African American Women.

Gary Younge is the New York Foreign Correspondent for The Guardian, and a frequent contributor to The Nation. He was the recipient of the Lawrence Stern Fellowship from The Washington Post, and his book No Place Like Home was shortlisted for the First Book Award from The Guardian. His most recent book is Who Are We - And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? (2010).

Free and open to the public. Seating on a first come, first served basis. Please arrive early to ensure a seat.

Women Writing Women's Lives presents Works In Progress
Defiant Brides of the American Revolution: Peggy Shippen Arnold and Lucy Flucker Knox
Speaker: Nancy Rubin Stuart

Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Women's Studies Certificate Program, Center for the Study of Women and Society, Center for the Humanities, and the PhD Programs in English and History

In this Works-in-Progress series, Nancy Rubin Stuart, Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center, reads from her Defiant Brides of the American Revolution, which traces the marriages of teenagers Peggy Shippen (of Philadelphia) and Lucy Flucker (of Boston), and discusses the writing of a double biography.

Third Annual Conference on Biography
Compromising Positions: Biography & Ethics

From The Aspern Papers to twenty-first century privacy issues: this year's annual conference focuses on the ethical questions that every biographer confronts. Featured participants include award-winning Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and, most recently, Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean.

Other speakers and panelists: Rachel Cohen, Scott Donaldson, Martin Duberman, Dorothy Gallagher, Brad Gooch, Rochelle Gurstein, Phoebe Hoban, Frances Kiernan, Honor Moore, David Nasaw, Mark Oppenheimer, John Palattella, Daniel Sharfstein, Alex Star, and more.

Schedule
Noon - 1:15 PM
Introduction/Welcome
Simon Winchester on the Ethics of Biography

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Family Matters: A Panel on the Ethics of Kinship
Introduced by Honor Moore and followed by a panel discussion with/talks by Mark Oppenheimer, Scott Donaldson, Brad Gooch, moderated by Honor Moore

2:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Break

3:00 PM – 3:45 PM
The Ethics of Reviewing
John Palattella and Alex Star

4:00 PM - 5:15 PM
Shades of Gray in the Picture Trade: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen
Talk by Rachel Cohen

Followed by Panegyric and Pathography: The Vexed Subject
Rachel Cohen, Dorothy Gallagher, Martin Duberman, moderated by David Nasaw
5:30 PM – 6:30 PM
Aspern Papers Recidivus: A Panel on Biography and Privacy
Introduced by Rochelle Gurstein and followed by a panel discussion with Phoebe Hoban, Frances Kiernan, and Daniel Sharfstein, moderated by Rochelle Gurstein

6:30 PM
The Unethical Death of the Author
Closing remarks by Brenda Wineapple

Click here to see photos of the event.

Click here to listen to a recording of the conference.

Rachel Cohen
Rachel Cohen is the author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists which won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, McSweeney's, Best American Essays, and other publications. She is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently at work on a biography of Bernard Berenson.

Scott Donaldson
Scott Donaldson has written biographies of such 20th-century American writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish (winner of the 1993 Ambassador Book Award), and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He taught at William and Mary for 30 years before retiring as Louise G.T. Cooley professor of English, emeritus. He recently completed a memoir of Charles A. Fenton, a charismatic teacher of his at Yale, and is now working on a book about the excitements and disappointments of writing biography.

Martin Duberman
Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at CUNY, where he founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He's authored more than 20 books, including Paul Robeson and The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Duberman is also a playwright; two of his plays will be produced this year, one in London, the other in Vancouver. His numerous awards include the Bancroft Prize, the Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Non-Fiction and the American Historical Association's Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarship.

Dorothy Gallagher
Dorothy Gallagher is the author of Hannah's Daughters, an account of a six-generation matrilineal family; All the Right Enemies, a biography of the Italian-American anarchist Carlo Tresca; and two memoirs: How I Came Into My Inheritance and Strangers in the House. Her articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Grand Street. She is currently working on a biography of Lillian Hellman.

Brad Gooch
Brad Gooch's most recent book is Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara; as well as Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America; three novels; two memoirs; a collection of stories; and a collection of poems. He is a professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. He is currently writing a biography of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, Rumi.

Rochelle Gurstein
Rochelle Gurstein is the author of The Repeal of Reticence: America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art. Her essays on intellectual history, aesthetics, and contemporary social and political matters have appeared in Salmagundi, Raritan, and other "little magazines." She currently writes a monthly column for The New Republic On-Line.

Phoebe Hoban
Phoebe Hoban's recently published biography of Alice Neel, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, was named one of the ten best books of 2010 by The Village Voice. Her biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Frances Kiernan
Frances Kiernan, the author of Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy and The Last Mrs. Astor, is currently at work on a new biography, The Two Mrs. Lowells [A Tale of Three Writers]. Although there were in fact three Mrs. Lowells, the two who concern her are Elizabeth Hardwick and Caroline Blackwood, who for seven years were entangled with the poet Robert Lowell in what one might call a literary mariage à trois.

Honor Moore
The Bishop's Daughter, Honor Moore's 2008 memoir and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in paperback in May 2009 along with a reissue of her biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter. She is also the author of three collections of poems-- Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir-- and her play Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women's Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited.

David Nasaw
David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book is Andrew Carnegie, which was awarded the 2007 New York Historical Society Prize in American History and chosen as a Notable Book of 2006 by The New York Times. He is also the author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling, Children of the City: At Work and At Play, and Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusement. He is currently working on a biography of Joseph P. Kennedy.

Mark Oppenheimer
Mark Oppenheimer holds a doctorate in religion, teaches at Yale, and writes the biweekly Beliefs column for The New York Times. He is the author of three previous books, including a memoir, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate. Mr. Oppenheimer's current project is a character study of G.E.M. Anscombe, the English philosopher who was Wittgenstein's greatest pupil. A conservative Catholic convert who had seven children, she wrote a famous pamphlet against contraception, held a famous debate against C. S. Lewis, and famously tried to stop Oxford from awarding an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman on the grounds that he was a mass murderer.

John Palattella
John Palattella is the literary editor of The Nation. He has written for numerous publications, including The Nation, the London Review of Books, and the Boston Review; he is the co-editor of Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It.

Daniel Sharfstein
Daniel J. Sharfstein's upcoming book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, is a multigenerational history of race in American life. It follows three families of African American descent who migrated across the color line and assimilated into white communities at different points in American history. Sharfstein is an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University.

Alexander Star
Alexander Star is the senior editor of The New York Times Book Review

Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester's many books include The Professor and the Madman, The Man Who Loved China, The Map that Changed the World, Krakatoa, and A Crack in the Edge of the World. Each of these have both been New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. Mr. Winchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by HM The Queen in 2006. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Brenda Wineapple
Brenda Wineapple is the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography whose most recent book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, a winner of the Marfield Prize, and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is currently writing a book on America, 1848-1877.

NBCC Finalists in Conversation

Co-sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle.

National Book Critics Circle biography and autobiography finalists in conversation with biography chair Eric Banks and autobiography co-chair Rigoberto González. With biography finalists Sarah Bakewell, Yunte Huang, and Thomas Powers, autobiography finalists Kai Bird, Darin Strauss, Patti Smith, and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. Hosted by Brenda Wineapple.

Carla Peterson discusses her Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Gotham Center for New York City History and the Center for Humanities.

Carla Peterson discusses her new book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City, which explores the lives of African-American elites in New York City in the 19th century.

The Last Queen of Egypt: Stacy Schiff on Cleopatra
Stacy Schiff

Join the Leon Levy Center for Biography for a night of discovery and insight with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Stacy Schiff, who will discuss her new biography, Cleopatra: A Life. "Cleopatra is buried under centuries of lies, and Stacy Schiff calls on her considerable powers to bring her back to life for us," says Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Kidder. "Schiff has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new again." Award-winning author Azar Nafisi notes, "Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history and ourselves." And Simon Winchester predicts Schiff's book "will become a classic."

Stacy Schiff is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

2010 Leon Levy Biography Lecture
featuring prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow

Each year, the Leon Levy Center for Biography selects a distinguished biographer to give the Biography Lecture, and for the 2010 Lecture proudly announces that the prize-winning author, Ron Chernow, will appear on September 28th, to discuss the art and craft of biography.

To date, Mr. Chernow has written The House of Morgan, which won a National Book Award, The Warburgs, which was cited by the American Library Association as one of the year's ten best books in 1993, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and praised by The Times of London as "one of the great American biographies," and Alexander Hamilton, which won a George Washington Book Prize for the year's best book about the founding era. The New York Times has called Mr. Chernow "as elegant an architect of monumental histories as we've seen in decades." A frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Chernow is a familiar figure on national radio and television shows—he has appeared on C-Span, CNN, the History Channel, and National Public Radio, and in numerous documentaries.

And this fall, his Washington: A Life, a rare single volume, full-length portrait of George Washington, will be released by Penguin Press.

Women Writing Women's Lives presents Works In Progress: Flora Shaw, Woman Journalist for The London Times: "Breaking Gender Barriers; Advocating Empire"
Speaker: Dorothy O. Helly

Co-Sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Women's Studies Certificate Program, Center for the Study of Women and Society, Center for the Humanities, and the PhD Programs in English and History

As a correspondent for The London Times, Shaw reported from South Africa, Australia, and Canada. Her columns on "The Colonies" and, especially, on imperial activities in Africa, led to worldwide fame in the 1890s. But how was Flora Shaw able to cultivate a reputation as a well-regarded journalist for The London Times during an era when few opportunities, career or otherwise, were available to women? Professor Dorothy O. Helly discussed.

Sleuthing the Sleuth: Yunte Huang on Charlie Chan
Yunte Huang

Yunte Huang will discuss his acclaimed new biography of Charlie Chan, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History. "Himself a brilliant sleuth," says Stephen Greenblatt, "Huang follows a trail of clues that leads to Honolulu and the deeply impressive career of Chang Apana, the Chinese-born detective on whom the character was based . . . Huang writes with rare personal intensity and capacious intelligence." Jonathan Spence notes that Charlie Chan "will permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping story." Moderated by Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Director/ Distinguished Writer-in-Residence of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and Robert Polito, author of the poetry collection Hollywood and God and Director of the Writing Program at the New School.

"Nonfiction Under Oath"
John D'Agata, David Shields, Brenda Wineapple & Wayne Koestenbaum

Why is nonfiction defined in the negative and how might it be revalued for its own sake? Join three pioneering nonfiction writers as they read from new work and discuss the challenges and rewards of working in prose. John D'Agata teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa; his new book, About a Mountain, is a book-length essay on nuclear waste and suicide in Las Vegas, Nevada. David Shields, who teaches English at the University of Washington and Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College, is most recently the author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, an ars poetica of writing "truthiness" in an unbearably artificial world. Brenda Wineapple’s most recent book is White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She is the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and her anthology, 19th Century American Writers on Writing (series editor Edward Hirsch), will be published next fall. Moderated by Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, novelist, and professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, who is currently working on a nonfiction book about Harpo Marx. Co-sponsored by the Center for Humanities.

"Works In Progress"
Keynote Speaker: Kathy Chamberlain

Kathy Chamberlain, Chair of the Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar, discusses her efforts to extricate Jane Welsh Carlyle & her husband Thomas Carlyle from the Victorian myths that continue to haunt their story today. Co-sponsored by the Women's Studies Certificate Program, the Center for the Study of Women and Society at The Graduate Center, and the Doctoral Program in English.

Annual Conference on Biography
Keynote Speaker: Arnold Rampersad

The Leon Levy Center for Biography is pleased to announce that its annual Conference on Biography will take place on Friday, March 19th, 2010, at Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, CUNY, featuring acclaimed author and MacArthur Fellow, Arnold Rampersad, author of books on Ralph Ellison, Jackie Robinson, and a two-volume biography of Langston Hughes.

Other participants include Patricia Bosworth (Columbia, Becoming Jane Fonda), Catherine Clinton (Queens University Belfast, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life), Gary Giddins (CUNY, Jazz), Molly Haskell (film critic, Frankly, My Dear), Langdon Hammer (Yale, Hart Crane and Allen Tate), Richard Howard (Columbia, Pulitzer prize winning poet, translator, essayist), Caryn James (film critic, What Catherine Knew), D.T. Max (New Yorker, The Family that Couldn't Sleep), Jed Perl (art critic, The New Republic; Antoine’s Alphabet), Andrew Sarris (prize-winning film critic, The American Cinema), Eric Salzman (composer, The New Music Theater), Ileene Smith (editor-at-large, Yale University Press), Amanda Vaill (Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins), Steve Wasserman (literary agent, former editor of the LA Times Book Review), and Brenda Wineapple (Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson).

Schedule
10:30 am – noon
Introduction
Keynote: "The End of Biography"
Arnold Rampersad

12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
Biography on the Nonverbal
Gary Giddins, Jed Perl, & Amanda Vaill, moderated by Eric Salzman

1:15 pm
Lunch Break

2:15 pm – 3:00 pm
Poetry, Biography, James Merrill
Richard Howard and Langdon Hammer

3:15 pm – 4:00 pm
Biography and Publishing: The Biographical Series and Beyond
Ileene Smith and Steve Wasserman

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
The Silver Screen: Directors, Film-makers, Biography, and the Sad State of the Biopic
Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris, moderated by Caryn James

5:15 pm – 6:00 pm
Culture and Anarchy; or, Biography and History
D.T. Max and Catherine Clinton

6:00 pm
"No Ideas but in People"
Closing remarks by Brenda Wineapple

Arnold Rampersad
Arnold Rampersad is Sara Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Stanford. His books include The Life of Langston Hughes (2 vols.), Jackie Robinson: A Biography, and Ralph Ellison: A Biography.

Patricia Bosworth
Patricia Bosworth's books include biographies of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and the photographer Diane Arbus as well as a memoir, Anything Your Little Heart Desires. She has taught at the Columbia School of Journalism and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She has just completed Becoming Jane Fonda, to be published by Houghton Mifflin in April 2011.

Catherine Clinton
Catherine Clinton has published over twenty books, including several
biographies – including Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom and
Mrs. Lincoln: A Life – and recently, a graphic novel: Booth. She teaches
and writes in Ireland where she holds a chair in U.S. history at Queens
University Belfast.

Gary Giddins
Gary Giddins wrote the “Weather Bird” jazz column in the Village Voice
for 30 years and served as artistic director of the American Jazz Orchestra,
1986-92. He teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center, and his books include
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, Celebrating Bird, Satchmo, Visions of
Jazz, Natural Selection, Jazz, and Warning Shadows, which will appear
in April.

Langdon Hammer
Langdon Hammer is Professor of English and American Studies at Yale.
He is writing a biography of James Merrill.

Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell is a film critic and author whose books include From
Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies; and, most
recently, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. She has taught
at Columbia, Barnard, and Sarah Lawrence, and served as film critic for
New York Magazine and Vogue.

Richard Howard
Richard Howard is a poet, translator and critic. He is a Professor of
Practice in the School of the Arts at Colombia University (Writing Division).

Caryn James
Caryn James is the film critic for Marie Claire and contributes to
Newsweek, The Daily Beast, The New York Times Book Review and others.
Formerly a film and television critic for The New York Times and an editor
at the Times Book Review, she is the author of such novels as What
Caroline Knew.

D.T. Max
D.T. Max is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of The Family
That Couldn’t Sleep: Unravelling a Medical Mystery. Last year he wrote
“The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass Infinite Jest,”
which is the basis for the biography he is currently working on. He lives in
Montclair, NJ with his wife, two children and a dog also named Max.

Jed Perl
Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic and the author of a number
of books, including New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century, Antoine’s
Alphabet: Watteau and His World, and Eyewitness: Reports from an Art
World in Crisis. A visiting professor at The New School, he is currently
working on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder, to be
published by Knopf.

Eric Salzman
Eric Salzman is a writer and composer whose recent works include two
music-theater pieces with Valeria Vasilevski, The True Last Words of
Dutch Schultz; his Brecht Suite, taken from his score for a French
language production of The Good Person of Sechuan, premiered in
New York in 2009. He is the author, with Thomas Desi, of the recent
New Music Theater, and he is currently artistic director of the Center for
Contemporary Opera.

Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris is a professor of film history, theory and criticism at
Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He has written film criticism
for more than fifty years, for Film Culture, The Village Voice and The
New York Observer. His books include The American Cinema; The Films
of Josef von Sternberg; Confessions of a Cultist; and You Ain’t Heard
Nothin’ Yet: the American Talking Film: History and Memory, 1927-1949.
He has won many awards and was the subject of a Festschrift, Citizen
Sarris, American Film Critic.

Ileene Smith
Ileene Smith, a recipient of the PEN/Roger Klein Award and other
editorial prizes, is editor at large for trade books at Yale University
Press. This fall she will publish Robert Gottlieb’s Sarah: A Life of Sarah
Bernhardt, as the launch of Jewish Lives, a major new series
of biography.

Amanda Vaill
Amanda Vaill is author of Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara
Murphy – A Lost Generation Love Story and Somewhere: The Life of
Jerome Robbins, as well as the screenplay for the Emmy-winning PBS
documentary, Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About. She is
currently at work on a new book, Hotel Florida: Love and Death in Spain,
1936-1939.

Steve Wasserman
Steve Wasserman, a director of literary agency Kneerim & Williams,
is former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and principal
architect of the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (1996-
2005). Prior to joining the LA Times, Steve was for six years the editorial
director of Times Books, and his authors/books included President Bill
Clinton, Sister Souljah, and Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father.

Brenda Wineapple
Brenda Wineapple is Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
Her most recent book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson
and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her anthology
Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing will appear next fall.

February 2 Archivists' Symposium
Featuring Nancy Milford, William L. Joyce, Stephen Enniss and Allan Goodrich

Without the debris of life (the letters, the napkin scribbles, the school papers), without the voice on the tape, the gesture caught in the photograph, what can the biographer know? William L. Joyce, the Special Collections Head Librarian at Pennsylvania State University; Stephen Enniss, Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington; and Allan Goodrich, Chief Archivist of the JFK Presidential Library in Boston will discuss the art of safekeeping. Moderated by Nancy Milford, Founding Director Emerita of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

DOROTHEA LANGE: A Life Beyond Limits
Linda Gordon

Join us for the launch event for the highly anticipated biography of a complex figure in the American cultural and political landscape. Widely regarded as the most influential American female photographer of the twentieth century, Dorothea Lange is known for her iconic documentary photographs of the Depression generation. The first biography of this seminal artist, written by renowned historian Linda Gordon, DOROTHEA LANGE: A Life Beyond Limits [W. W. Norton & Company, 2009] is a sweeping account of this fascinating photographer’s life and work. Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of numerous books and won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

The 2009 Leon Levy Biography Lecture
Robert A. Caro

Robert A. Caro, the lauded biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson, will give the 2009 Leon Levy Biography Lecture. Each year, the Leon Levy Center for Biography selects a biographer of note to give the annual lecture. The lecturer speaks on the process of researching and writing a biography, with a focus on their current work in progress.

Robert A. Caro is the author of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and The Years of Lyndon Johnson, comprised of three published volumes: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent and Master of the Senate. Mr. Caro is at work on his fourth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, an examination of Johnson's years in the White House. Together Caro's biographies of Moses and Johnson have garnered a number of honors, amongst them two Pulitzer Prizes for Biography, two National Book Critics Circle Awards for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best "exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist."

According to The Boston Globe, "Caro has a unique place among American political biographers. He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured." In 2007, he was the Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor at The American Academy in Berlin. Caro was a Carnegie Fellow at Columbia University and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

Radio Diaries Retrospective, 1999-2009
Mary Ann Weaver

Radio Diaries works with people to document their own lives for presentation on National Public Radio's This American Life. Their subjects include teenagers, seniors, prison inmates and others whose voices are rarely heard. The producers and a diarist will join journalist Mary Anne Weaver, 2008-9 Biography Fellow, to explore the radio documentaries that they have created over the past decade.

The Radio Diaries Retrospective revisited the stories of two diarists. Follow the links below to hear their diaries.

At age 17, Amanda recorded a diary about being a gay teenager. You can hear it at: http://www.radiodiaries.org/teenagediaries2.html.

John Mills served 11 years in prison for armed robbery. He recorded his life behind bars as part of the Prison Diaries series. John has been out of prison for 2 years. Now he's married and has a daughter. You can hear John's prison diary at: http://www.radiodiaries.org/prisondiaries.html.

www.radiodiaries.org

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness:
A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century
Adina Hoffman

A celebration of the Yale University Press' publication of Adina Hoffman's biography of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali.

Beautifully written, and composed with a novelist’s eye for detail, this book tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged.

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Eliot Weinberger has dubbed "perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today."

As it places Muhammad Ali's life in the context of the lives of his predecessors and peers, My Happiness offers a sweeping depiction of a charged and fateful epoch. It is a work that Arabic scholar Michael Sells describes as "among the five ‘must read’ books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy." In an era when talk of the "Clash of Civilizations" dominates, this biography offers something else entirely: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is rich, nuanced, and, above all else, deeply human.

Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement and on the BBC. One of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, she lives in Jerusalem.

Yale University Press : My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

First Annual Conference on Biography -
New Forms: Biography for the 21st Century
Benita Eisler, Kai-Ming Cha, Darcy Frey, Farah Griffin, Sid Hart, John Matteson, Jewell Robinson, Eiji Han Shimizu, Robert Vare, Michael Veal and Salim Washington

The first annual conference on biography at The Leon Levy Center for Biography will explore biography in all of its many guises. The conference schedule begins with a film screening and features talks by biographers working in a variety of genre and disciplines, ranging from literary biography and jazz studies to curatorial science.

1:00-2:35 pm
My Best Fiend- Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog (1999)

3:00-3:45 pm
Literary Biography for the 21st Century
Benita Eisler joined by John Matteson

4:00-4:45 pm
Framing Biography in Manga (Graphic Novels) and Anime (Animation)
Eiji Han Shimizu joined by Kai-Ming Cha

5:00-5:45 pm
Intersections of Biography and Jazz Studies- A Conversation
Farah Griffin and Salim Washington joined by Micheal Veal

6:00-6:45 pm
The Journalist as Biographer
Darcy Frey joined by Robert Vare

7:00-7:45 pm
Curating Biography
Staff members of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution:
Sid Hart, Senior Historian & Jewell Robinson, Director of Public Programs joined by Rachel Brownstein

Schedule subject to change.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

Kai-Ming Cha
Kai-Ming Cha covers comics and manga for PW Comics Week. Her reviews have also appeared in Kirkus Reviews, IGN.com, Entertainment Weekly, and Playboy.com. She is currently at work on a beginners guide to manga and is writing an essay for the Nation, Abu Dhabi, on Yoshihiro Tatsumi's forthcoming manga memoir, A Drifting Life.

Benita Eisler
A native New Yorker, Benita Eisler was educated at Smith and Harvard. She has worked as an art editor, reporter, on-camera correspondent, and producer of arts programming for pubic television. Her interest in the varieties of artistic expression is reflected in her teaching and writing: She has taught the nineteenth- and twentieth century novel at Princeton and is the author of biographies of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; Lord Byron, and Frédéric Chopin. She lives in Manhattan.

Darcy Frey
Darcy Frey is the author of The Last Shot (Houghton-Mifflin, 1994), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and George Divoky's Planet (forthcoming from Pantheon). He has also been a Contributing Editor for Harper's Magazine and a longtime Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine, for which he has written about science, medicine, technology, music, art, and the environment. His essays and journalism have been anthologized in Best American Essays and Best American Science Writing. His honors include a National Magazine Award, the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, and an award for public service from the Society for Professional Journalists. He is currently the Briggs-Copeland lecturer in nonfiction writing at Harvard.

Farah Jasmine Griffin
Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English and comparative literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she serves as director of the Institute for Research in African American studies. Her most recent book Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever was written with co-author Salim Washington and published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2008. She is also the author of "Who Set You Flowin'": The African-American Migration Narrative and If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, and has edited several collections of letters and essays. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, Callaloo, and African American Review, and she is also a frequent commentator on WNPR’s News & Notes.

Sidney Hart
Sidney Hart is Senior Historian of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and Editor of the Peale Family Papers. He received his doctorate from Clark University. Hart has edited five volumes of The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, and has authored articles on Peale in several scholarly publications. His specialties include the political and cultural history of the American Revolution and the early national period, twentieth-century political history, and the American presidency. Hart has curated "The Presidency and the Cold War," "Herblock's Presidents," "Presidents-in-Waiting" (with co-curator, James Barber), an examination of the fourteen Vice-Presidents who succeeded to the presidency, and is currently working on a bicentennial exhibit of the War of 1812.

John Matteson
John Matteson is an Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. A Princeton University graduate, he has earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Before pursuing his doctorate in English, Professor Matteson worked as a litigation attorney in California and North Carolina. His scholarship in nineteenth-century American literature includes articles published in Leviathan, Streams of William James, and the New England Quarterly. His first book, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Jewell Robinson
Jewell Robinson is the Public Program Director for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, where she conceives, produces, writes, and occasionally performs in National Portrait Gallery's Cultures in Motion Series. Armed with a liberal arts education, a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, an interest in history, and a professional background in the theatrical performance, she came to the Portrait Gallery with the specific task of creating programming that would educate the public about the lives of the sitters in the gallery’s permanent collection and special exhibitions, with a particular focus on showcasing the diversity that the collection represents.

Eiji Han Shimizu
Eiji Han Shimizu is head of Emotional Content, a collective of Japanese manga artists who adapt and publish the biographies of 20th-century visionaries like the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Che Guevara in the graphic novel format. Shimizu calls these manga-styled works "BioGraphic Novels." Based in Los Angeles and Yokohama, Japan, the small publishing venture first showcased its books at the Frankfurt Book Fair and published its first biographic novel, The 14th Dalai Lama by Tetsu Saiwai, last summer. Additional projects include recent biographic novels on Mother Teresa and Che Guevara. Forthcoming titles include works on the imprisoned Burmese democratic activist Aung San Suu Kyi, Gandhi and Anne Frank. Born in Japan to Korean parents, Eiji Han Shimizu received his undergraduate and MBA degrees in the United States.

Robert Vare
Robert Vare is the editor at large of The Atlantic Monthly. He is a former editor at The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Magazine, where, in 1991, he edited the Pulitzer Prize-winning cover story "Grady’s Gift." He has edited two anthologies: Things Worth Fighting For (2004), a posthumously published collection of writings by Michael Kelly, the former Atlantic editor-in-chief who was killed while covering the war in Iraq, and The American Idea: 150 Years of Writers and Thinkers Who Shaped Our History (2007), a sesquicentennial celebration of the Atlantic's finest moments in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Yale and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Michael E. Veal
Michael E. Veal is a musician and scholar. He is currently Professor of Ethnomusicology at Yale University, and the author of Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Temple University Press) and Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press). His forthcoming book Technotopia 1969 is about the music of Miles Davis. Professor Veal is also a bassist and saxophonist and leader of the Aqua Ife big band and the Aqua Ife small group.

Michael Salim Washington
Associate Professor Michael Salim Washington, a faculty member of the Conservatory of Music of Brooklyn College, CUNY is on a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, in Durban, from January through August 2009 on the subject of "The Aesthetics and Social Valences of South African Jazz." An accomplished saxophonist, Washington has led two bands, the Roxbury Blues Aesthetic and the Harlem Arts Ensemble. He has recorded four CDs as a bandleader, including Love in Exile and Harlem Homecoming. He is an avid composer and teaches music and Africana Studies at Brooklyn College. His book with co-author Farah Jasmine Griffin, Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever was published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2008.

Fellows' Colloquium
Molly Peacock & Mary Ann Weaver

Two fellows will present their works in progress. Mary Anne Weaver's Strange Journey of Ziad Jarrah: The Story of a Terrorist is the biography on the most improbable of the September 11th pilots. Molly Peacock's project is an impressionistic biography examining the late-life artistic coming-of-age of Mrs. Mary Granville Delany, the 18th-century cut-paper botanical artist.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
Fred Kaplan

An event in celebration of the acclaimed biography of Abraham Lincoln by Fred Kaplan, Professor Emeritus of English, The Graduate Center, CUNY.

This English Department Friday Forum is sponsored by The Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

Fellows' Colloquium
James Davis & Thulani Davis

Two fellows will present their works in progress. James Davis is at work on a meditation on the life and work of Eric Walrond, a writer who rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance before moving to England. Thulani Davis has begun a biography of four blues queens: Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and Bessie Smith.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
Andrea Weiss

Andrea Weiss, Professor of Film Studies at City College, CUNY, tells the harrowing story of Erika and Klaus Mann, the children of the writer Thomas Mann and screens excerpts from her film, Escape to Life, about the siblings' escape from Nazi Germany.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.

Amy Henderson
Amy Henderson has been a cultural historian at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery since 1975, specializing in 20th and 21st century music, movie, and theater history, and in the history of American celebrity culture. Her books and exhibitions include On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting (1988); Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American Musical (1996; the SITES traveling version of this exhibition went to 28 venues); Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian (1997); the six-part PBS American Masters series Broadway (2005); "The Changing Face of Celebrity Culture" (2005); KATE: A Centennial Celebration (2007-08); and Elvis at 21 ( forthcoming SITES exhibition, 2009- ).

Patricia Bosworth
Patricia Bosworth's Diane Arbus: A Biography inspired the motion picture FUR, starring Nicole Kidman & Robert Downey Jr. Her other books include acclaimed biographies of Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, as well as her memoir, Anything Your Little Heart Desires. Ms. Bosworth is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. She has taught literary non-fiction at Columbia University and Barnard College and is the winner of the Front Page Award. A long-time Board Member of the Actors Studio, she is currently completing a biography of Jane Fonda for Houghton-Mifflin.

Photo: A. Coppa

Greg Tate
Greg Tate is a staff writer at the Village Voice. His writings on art, music and culture have also appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, Premiere, Downbeat and Artforum. His books include; Flyboy In The Buttermilk (Simon and Schuster, 1992) Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (Acapella, 2003) and Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture. (Broadway, Random House, 2003) James Brown Body, a biography of the American music icon is Tate's current work in progress and will be published by Riverhead Books in 2010.

Emily Braun
Distinguished Professor of late-19th- and 20th - Century European and American Art.

In addition to her work on modern Italian art and fascist culture, Professor Emily Braun has published on renaissance architecture, late nineteenth-century European painting, twentieth-century American art, women's studies, Jewish history, and contemporary painting and sculpture. She was awarded a Senior Research Grant from the Getty Foundation (1993), the Hunter College Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2001), and a Fellowship from the New York Public Library Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers (2002). As a contributing author, she has twice received the annual Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogues of Distinction in the Arts (Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting (1982) and Gardens and Ghettos (1990). In 2005 she won a National Jewish Book Award for The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name.

Maryse Condé & Elizabeth Nunez

Author and Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Maryse Condé will be joined by Elizabeth Nunez in an exploration of the role of biography in her work. Condé's most recent book, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (Mercure de France, 2007) is the biography of her mother and grandmother. Her writings include Heremakhonon, I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem and Segu. Elizabeth Nunez, Ph.D. is Provost and Senior Vice President at Medgar Evers College and a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English. Dr. Nunez is the award-winning author of six novels: Prospero's Daughte; Grace; Discretion; Bruised Hibiscus; Beyond the Limbo Silence; and When Rocks Dance. Dr. Nunez co-edited the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad and her seventh novel, Anna In-Between, will be published in 2009.

Unless otherwise noted, all events are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do not offer reserve seating. Please arrive early to get a seat.