Events

On Biography is a conversation and reading series devoted to the craft of biography. Host Rachel Syme will speak to leaders and emerging stars of the biography world, discussing the thrills and challenges of writing about a life. This series will explore the ethics of reading personal letters and diaries, the controversies that come with writing someone else's story, and the excitement of uncovering a treasure in the archives. Rachel will talk with Stacy Schiff.Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d'Amérique. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions. Her latest book is Cleopatra, a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She lives in New York City.Rachel Syme is the former Books Editor for National Public Radio and a current NPR contributor and contributing culture editor for TIME Magazine. She is currently writing a biography of the love affair between Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and author F. Scott Fitzgerald for Random House. She has read so many biographies that she often feels like she is living a hundred other lives in addition to her own.