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.