Established with a generous gift from the Leon Levy Foundation in 2007 as a hub for writers, scholars, students, teachers, and readers of biography, the Leon Levy Center for Biography at The Graduate Center, CUNY builds connections between independent and university-affiliated biographers across disciplines and cultivates important discussions about the art and craft of biography historically and in our time.
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“The Leon Levy Fellowship changed my life entirely… The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 was the illustrated biography I wrote because the fellowship gave me the confidence to risk writing a ‘collage biography’ of an 18th-century collage artist.”
—Molly Peacock, 2008–2009 fellow, author of The Paper Garden (McClelland & Stewart, 2010).
Former Fellow Adam Shatz Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction
Adam Shatz, whose biography of Frantz Fanon, The Rebel's Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January of 2024, was a awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the [...]
The 5 biography fellows for 2024 – 2025
Kai Bird, the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, announced today the award of five resident fellowships at the Graduate Center, including the sixth Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow for a biography [...]
Kai Bird Wins Prestigious BIO Award
Executive Director Kai Bird has won the BIO Award, an honor bestowed annually by the Biographers International Organization, to "a distinguished colleague who has made significant contributions to the art and craft of biography." Director [...]
Former Fellow Krithika Varagur awarded Robert and Ina Caro Travel/Research Fellowship
The Biographers International Organization has awarded former LLCB Fellow Krithika Varagur a Robert and Ina Caro Travel/Research Fellowship for her group biography The Singh Princesses: Three Sisters at the End of Empire.
Former Fellow Justin Gifford 2024 Awarded NEH Grant for Delany biography
Former Biography Fellow Justin Gifford was awarded a 2024 National Endowment for the Humanties grant for his new biography-in-process, Time Considered as a Helix: The Life of Samuel R. Delany.
Former Fellow Krithika Varagur Wins 2024 Silvers-Dudley Prize in Journalism
The Robert B. Silvers Foundation announced the recipients of the third annual Silvers-Dudley Prizes, which recognize “outstanding achievement in literary criticism, arts writing, and journalism.” Former Fellow Krithika Varagur (2022 - 2023), along with Fintan [...]