Writing Fellowship for Biography: The Frances "Frank" Rollin Fellowship for African American Biography

The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship

$5000 for an Exceptional Biography-in-progress About an African American Subject 

Deadline: Feb. 1, 2024

The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship awards $5,000 each to two authors working on a biographical work about an African American figure or figures whose story provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience. This fellowship also provides the recipients with a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO Conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels.

The Rollin Fellowship aims to remediate the disproportionate scarcity and even suppression of Black lives and voices in the broad catalog of published biography. This fellowship reflects not only BIO’s commitment to supporting working biographers but to encouraging diversity in the field.

Frances “Frank” Rollin (1845-1901)

 

The Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship for African American Biography is named for one of the first known African American biographers and is awarded to promote biographies of African American lives.

The fellowship’s namesake, Frances Anne Rollin Whipper — who wrote under her nickname-turned-pen name “Frank A. Rollin” — was a 19th century author and activist. Her groundbreaking 1868 biography, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, about a Black abolitionist journalist, physician and Union Army officer, positioned her as among the first recorded African American biographers. Reception to her book in the Black press underscored the significance of her precedent and called for more biographies of African Americans. This fellowship, in her honor, seeks to carry on that call.

In the spirit of Rollin’s achievement, BIO’s Rollin Fellowship aims to foster the development of biographical works that encourage deeper insight into the complexity of race relations at the bedrock of American history. This fellowship will support any biography that highlights the Black experience in the Americas, and that is set within the vast time period between (and even before) 1619 and the present. It will support any aspect of African American inhabitancy, dispersion, immigration or emigration. It will support biographies of Black lives often marginalized by gender, gender-orientation, sexuality or disability.

BIO launched the Rollin Fellowship in 2020 and first presented an award of $2,000 to a single winner in May 2021 and again in 2022. As of May 2023, with a generous donation from Kitty Kelley, BIO increased the award to $5,000 each for two winners.

More information and submission link here.