This program’s guests—a first-time author and a veteran novelist—spent decades researching family histories shadowed by war, global politics, and anti-Asian racism. Kim Liao discovered a many-layered story suppressed both in her family and by the Taiwanese government featuring her grandfather, a leader of the Taiwanese independence movement after World War II. Marnie Mueller, born in a Japanese American concentration camp in 1942 and later befriended by Mary Mon Toy, a talented “showgirl” incarcerated in a different camp, became her friend’s executor. After Mon Toy’s death in 2009, a hidden life story emerged that begged to be told alongside Mueller’s own long-concealed history. Learn about “intimate biography” from two authors who are inventing the form.

Megan Marshall’s innovative books, including The Peabody Sisters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller, are treasured works of American biography. Now Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art and life, reinventing the personal essay as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book’s six chapters range across centuries and continents, from Heian Kyoto to Hawthorne’s Concord, WWI Paris to 1960s Pasadena, Marshall’s California hometown, when Civil Rights gave way to Black Power as seen through the short, tragic life of her classmate Jonathan Jackson. Join Megan Marshall in conversation with distinguished historian John Stauffer as they discuss the biographer’s impulse to learn from others, as Marshall writes, “how to live, how not to live, what it means to live.”

The New England Biography Series is proud to present a conversation with the renowned biographer Jean Strouse about her newly published group portrait of painter John Singer Sargent and the twelve subjects of his largest commission, the Wertheimers of London. Brisk, deft, and as stylish as any Sargent likeness, Family Romance offers what her previous books on Alice James and J.P. Morgan so effectively provide—an intimate account of individual lives that also evokes a panoramic social milieu.  In these pages, a restless age comes to vivid life.  Join Jean Strouse in conversation with Natalie Dykstra about Sargent and his subjects and about the art of biography.

The New England Biography Series is proud to convene a conversation with three well-known children’s writers who focus on biographies of underrepresented groups. Ray Anthony Shepard, whose award-winning books for teens include biographies of well-known and relatively unknown Black Americans; and Heather Lang, whose biographies for young readers focus on amazing but mostly unfamiliar women, will discuss their work, what biographies for children can do, and why it’s important to be writing for children in these times when some communities struggle over control of school curricula, public library holdings, and controversies about whether there are books that should be banned.

Back in 2020 at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when communal spaces and community itself seemed under threat, biographers Wade and Doherty published books long in the making—Square Haunting and The Equivalents—which celebrated two cohorts of creative women, the first based in London’s Bloomsbury and the second at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Join us for a conversation that will range over the subjects of their books—including Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Sayers, Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin—and their work since: Wade on a biography of Gertrude Stein; Doherty in biographical essays for the New Yorker on Elizabeth Hardwick, Kathy Acker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Although their books have been reviewed jointly, this will be their first public appearance together.

Biographers often have to "fill in the blanks" of their subjects' lives. Telling the stories of women is sometimes even more complicated because historically, many women's papers were overlooked or discarded by "keepers of records." And telling the stories of women of color can present even more dilemmas for the biographer, since the material life of women from disenfranchised groups has often not been preserved. Join biographer and Tufts professor Julie Dobrow, while she facilitates a conversation between Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute and author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, and Tiya Miles, Harvard Professor of History and author of All That She Carried, winner of the 2021 National Book Award.

Clover is a full-length play by Laura Rocklyn and Ty Hallmark exploring the life of Clover Adams, wife of Henry Adams and pioneer female photographer. Upon arriving in Gilded Age Washington, D.C., Clover immerses herself in the political and social scene, but then, the death of her beloved father and possible trouble in her marriage subject her to darker forces that run in her family line.