Biographers International Conference in New York

PANEL: In the Right Hands: Biographers as Collectors

Biographers can support their research by collecting important related material often overlooked on the market or in storerooms and unavailable in any repository or online. This panel will explore what authors have purchased, inherited, or been given, whether books, manuscripts, periodicals, ephemera, artworks, textiles, or objects, produced or owned by or pertaining to the biography subjects. The panelists will illustrate and illuminate the value of what they acquired, sometimes in the most unexpected places and at the last minute, and will discuss how items shaped their biography narratives and shed light on pivotal moments in their subjects’ lives and careers. The session will also cover how those materials can be transferred to institutional collections for safekeeping.

Moderator

A’Lelia Bundles is the author of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, a biography of her great-grandmother, and On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother. Her books have benefited from the voluminous Walker Company documents that her family donated to the Indiana Historical Society in the early 1980s. To organize and preserve another trove of materials inherited from her grandparents, she founded the Madam Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker ephemera, photographs, and correspondence. She serves on several nonprofit boards and was a producer and executive during her 30-year career in network television news.

Panelists

Eve M. Kahn, an independent scholar and regular New York Times contributor, has written two biographies that have resulted in boxfuls of important primary source material tucked away in her home. She has thousands of pages of circa-1900 correspondence that inspired her 2019 book about the forgotten artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857-1907), as well as rare periodicals, inscribed books, photos, ephemera, and even restaurant cutlery related her 2025 book about the writer, publisher and social justice activist Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914).

Richard Kopley, Distinguished Professor emeritus of English at Penn State DuBois, is the author of Edgar Allan Poe: A Life (University of Virginia Press, 2025). The book is informed by Kopley’s extraordinary archive of letters about Poe by Flora Lapham Mack, the stepdaughter of Poe’s best friend, John H. Mackenzie. Kopley is also the author of The Threads of “The Scarlet Letter”: A Study of Hawthorne’s Transformative Art (University of Delaware Press, 2003), Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe to the Present (Camden House, 2018). Former president of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society and the Poe Studies Association, he is the first recipient of the PSA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Kopley served as a Fulbright Specialist and a Virginia Humanities Fellow, and he recently became a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Jared Stearns is the author of Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress, 2024). He has built the largest known collection of Chambers memorabilia, spanning personal papers, photographs, contracts, film, periodicals, ephemera, and even clothing. He has written about Chambers for publications such as Cineaste, The Dark Side, and The San Franciscan. His work has also appeared in The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston. He’s working on his next biography.