BIO Conference: Potomac Fever

I went to the sixteenth annual Biographers International Conference on June 5 and 6 at the National Press Club in Washington. It gave me a great jolt of energy and optimism.

Despite the fraught times, etc. etc. (and I am not minimizing them), biographers are tackling difficult subjects, raising up overlooked people, and helping each other succeed. “What about this?” “Have you looked at that?” “This is how I dealt with….” Lots of sharing of ideas and work-arounds.

I consider my current project, about Alexandria during the Civil War, a “biography of a place.” So I didn’t feel like a total outlier.

My conference began with breakfast at Old Ebbits Grill with three members of a virtual writing group that grew out of the 2020 BIO conference. (We have never all met in person and, in fact, I met one of my breakfast mates in person for the first time!) Then I took a bus to Howard University for an orientation of the Moorland-Springarn Research Center. The curator of the University Archives gave an overview and offered a few ideas for each person’s project or research question. Her more generalizable suggestion is to start a search with Digital Howard.

That afternoon, authors of newly published books gave short readings, following by an awards presentation. I was on one of the awards committees and presented the Hazel Rowley Prize (which supports a first-time biographer) to Elizabeth Schott, who is writing a biography of textile designer Dorothy Wright Liebes. It was great to do that.

The conference began in earnest early the next morning. (Here is the program.) A few take-aways:

• Journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, despite all their experence, agree “the blank screen is a killer.” (i.e., the writing part is hard). I was comforted to know that they go back to previous notes and interviews to rediscover things they did not follow up on, things they now see differently, and the like.

• A session on AI surfaced concerns for copyright and liaibility, but also a good reminder to explore what AI can offer. One random idea is to provide a few paragraph description of a writing piece and request a tagline for it. I need to learn more.

• FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests take time and require persistence. Conversely, be ready to download information when, out of the blue, you get an email with a link to the requested information. One presenter keeps a spreadsheet of her FOIA requests (obviously, she does a lot of them). Then every few months, she can follow up with “do yo have an update on…”

• Documentary filmmaker Dawn Porter, recipient of the 2025 BIO Awasd, pitches her ideas with a sense of the story— the visuals and what she can bring to the subject (not just a recitation of interesting facts about the subject)

• People still use business cards, at least biographers do. I am glad I brought some.