2016 Annual Conference

Ada Calhoun is the author of St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street, the critically acclaimed book about the New York street where she was born and raised. She has been a crime reporter for the New York Post, a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, and an essayist for New York magazine, The New Yorkeronline, and The New York Times.

Lisa Cohen is the author of All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, BOMB, The Paris Review, Vogue, The New Yorker online, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She is the Bennet Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University.

Cathy Curtis is the author of Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter, a biography of a New York artist whose life was a rollercoaster of struggle, triumph, neglect, and rediscovery. A former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, Curtis is an alumna of Smith College and the University of California, Berkeley. Her next book, Quicksilver: The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning, will inaugurate the Oxford Cultural Biographies series.

Gary Giddins wrote the “Weather Bird” jazz column in the Village Voice for 30 years, and is the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, where he also teaches. His books include Riding on a Blue Note, Rhythm-a-Ning, Faces in the Crowd, Satchmo, Visions of Jazz, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, Weather Bird, Natural Selection, Jazz (with Scott DeVeaux), and Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema. His new edition of Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker was published in 2013 by the University of Minnesota.

Peter Guralnick has been called “a national resource” by critic Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country’s intertwined black and white musical traditions. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love; Sweet Soul Music; and Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. His latest work, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, has just been published.

Hayden Herrera is an art historian and biographer who earned her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work, as well as Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, and Matisse: A Portrait. Her most recent book is Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi.

Margo Jefferson is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts, and she was for years a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, New York magazine, Vogue, and other publications, and she is the author of On Michael Jackson. Her most recent book is Negroland: A Memoir.

Josh Karp is the author of three books, most recently Orson Welles’s Last Movie. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Salon, and many other publications. Karp is currently developing a television pilot with Touchy Feely Productions and a film version of Orson Welles’s Last Movie for Beech Hill Films. He lives near Chicago with his wife and four sons.

William P. Kelly is the New York Public Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries, former interim chancellor of the City University of New York and president of the Graduate Center, and the current chairman of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the author of Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales, and of the forthcoming book Astoria: John Jacob Astor, the West, and the World. 

D.T. Max is a staff writer at The New Yorkerand the author of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery, and Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, which he completed as a fellow of the Leon Levy Center for Biography and which was a New York Times bestseller named by many critics as one of the best books of 2012. He is currently a Guggeheim Fellow at work on The Most Conspicuous Person on the Planet, a book about Mark Twain. Last semester he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton.

Patrick McGilligan is the author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to ‘Citizen Kane,’ named one of the best books of 2015 by the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. He is also the author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light; Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; and George Cukor: A Double Life; and books on the lives of directors Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and Oscar Micheaux, and actors James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. 

Daniel Menaker edited fiction at The New Yorker for twenty years. In 2004 he was named Editor-in-Chief of Random House. He is the author of six books, most recently a memoir, My Mistake, and he has twice won the O. Henry Award for short fiction.

David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center, co-founder of the Leon Levy Center for Biography and a member of its Advisory Board, and a past president of the Society of American Historians. He is the author of Andrew Carnegie, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, winner of the Bancroft Prize; and The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize named by many critics as one of the best books of 2012.

Annalyn Swan is the author, with Mark Stevens, of de Kooning: An American Master, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the National Book Critics Circle prize for biography, the Los Angeles Times biography award, and was named one of the 10 best books of 2005 by The New York Times. She and Stevens are currently working on a biography of the British artist Francis Bacon. Swan is a member of the LLCB Advisory Board and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Center, where she teaches a master’s course on the art of biography.