Events

Wednesday, January 29, 2025
FROM ANOTHER PLACE – James Baldwin & Sedat Pakay in Istanbul 
Schermerhorn Hall, room 612, 5:00-6:30 pm, Columbia University

June 6, 2025, Washington, D.C.
“Ten Years and Counting: How to Live with your Biography,” Panel featuring Nicholas Boggs, Megan Marshall, and Tamara Payne, moderated by Carla Kaplan, at the Biographer's International Annual Conference. 

Ten Years and Counting: How to Live With Your Biography

Researching and writing a life often takes a very long time, and nearly always longer than the biographer expects: organizing and digitizing an archive, creating an historical/intellectual/cultural context, traveling to the places that mattered to a subject and helped make them who they were, transforming massive amounts of information into narrative. This panel will touch on practical aspects of the long haul—funding, time management, and strategies for making archival research more efficient. But the primary focus will be on the psychology of living with another person’s life for a decade or more.  Managing self-doubt and deadline anxiety, keeping your personal relationships in order, finding community, even making the loneliness of the long-distance writer work to your advantage. All these will be considered in a wide-ranging discussion that welcomes audience participation. So many of us have been there!

Moderator

Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University, has published seven books, including Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, both New York Times Notable Books. Her biography of Jessica Mitford is forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2025.  Kaplan chairs the Signs editorial board, founded Northeastern’s Humanities Center, has held fellowships from the NEH Public Scholars, the Guggenheim Foundation, Cullman Center, DuBois Institute, Schomburg Center, New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and elsewhere, is on the BIO board, and is a Society of American Historians fellow.

Panelists

Nicholas Boggs is the author of Baldwin: A Love Story, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August 2025. He rediscovered and co-edited Baldwin’s collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018). 

Megan Marshall is the author, most recently, of the essay collection After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. Her biography Margaret Fuller: A New American Life was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast is a genre-blurring biography-cum-memoir of her poetry professor at Harvard College in the 1970s.  She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor at Emerson College and a recipient of the BIO Award.

Tamara Payne is a Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, written with her father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Les Payne, and published by Liveright.