Craig Howes
Center Director and Biography Coeditor
Craig Howes has been the Director of the Center for Biographical Research since 1997, and editor and coeditor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly since 1994. As CBR Director, he is also General Editor of the Biography Monograph Series, co-published with the University of Hawai‘i Press. Since 2000, he has served as series scholar and co-producer for the Biography Hawai‘i television documentary series.
His book Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witnesses to Their Fight (Oxford UP, 2003) was selected as a Choice notable book. He coedited with Miriam Fuchs the collection Teaching Life Writing (2008) for the Modern Language Association’s Options in Teaching Series. He is also the author of short stories, and many essays on life writing, captivity narratives, satire, and nineteenth-century British and American literature.
A former Vice President and President of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, he served from 2005 to 2009 on the Executive Board for the Division of Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing for the Modern Language Association. He is the list manager for IABA-L, the listserv for life writing scholars sponsored by the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA).
He teaches courses in life writing, editing, composition, literary theory, poetry, and drama, receiving the University of Hawai‘i Board of Regents Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1998. In 2005, he received the Hung Wo and Elizabeth Lau Ching Foundation Award for Faculty Service to the Community from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. A past president of the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council, and a former member of the board of Kumu Kahua Theatre, he currently serves on the boards of the Hawaiian Historical Society and Monkey Waterfall Dance Theatre Company. He has numerous stage and television credits as an actor, and was co-producer for the radio program Aloha Shorts, a literature performance show broadcast on Hawai‘i Public Radio.
Cynthia G. Franklin
Biography Coeditor
Cynthia G. Franklin, coeditor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly since 2007, has been teaching in the English Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa since receiving her PhD from University of California at Berkeley in 1994. Her publications include Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today (2009) and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies(1997).
She has coedited three special issues of Biography—the open access Life in Occupied Palestine(2014) with Ibrahim Aoude and Morgan Cooper,Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing (2004) with Laura E. Lyons, and Translating Lives (2009) with Miriam Fuchs. Coauthored work with Laura Lyons appears in American Studies, Biography, and Life Writing. In addition, she has published articles and reviews in journals including American Quarterly, American Studies, Biography, The Contemporary Pacific, Cultural Critique, GLQ, Hitting Critical Mass, LIT, MELUS, and in books including Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the Cellular Level and This Bridge We Call Home.
She has served on the Board for American Quarterly, and is on the Editorial Collective for EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities).
She has won both the Frances Davis Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Board of Regents Award for Excellence in Teaching.
At the University of Hawai’i she is faculty advisor and cofounder of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine (SFJP@UH).
L. Ayu Saraswati
Biography Coeditor
L. Ayu Saraswati is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. She is the author of Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie (New York UP, 2021), Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain (New York UP, 2023), and Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia (U of Hawai’i P, 2013), which won the 2013 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa book prize. She is also the coeditor of Introduction to Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches (Oxford UP, 2017) and Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader (Oxford UP, 2017). She is also a board member of WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly).
John David Zuern
Biography Coeditor
John David Zuern is Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His work focuses on literary criticism and theory, electronic literature, life writing, and rhetoric. His recent publications include an article on the life writing of Louis Althusser in Life Writing (2011), chapters on electronic literature in Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching (2010), and a critical history of the networking company Cisco Systems in the volume Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation (Indiana UP, 2010). He has served as guest editor for a special issue of the journal Biography devoted to online life writing.
Paige Rasmussen
Managing Editor
Caroline Zuckerman
Graduate Assistant, Editorial Assistant and Reviews Editor
Keoni Rodriguez
Editorial and Publicity Assistant
George Simson
Founding Center Director and Biography Editor
George Simson came to the University of Hawai‘i in 1963, with a University of Minnesota PhD, a dissertation on Lytton Strachey, and a passion for exploring, researching, and teaching about the history, theory, and practice of biography. He assembled a group of like-minded colleagues, and in 1978 brought out the inaugural issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, now in its fifth decade of publication. In 1988, the University’s Board of Regents approved the establishment of the Center for Biographical Research, with George as its founding director. Now Professor Emeritus of English, George inaugurated the various structures and core activities for which the Center is still known: besides the journal, publishing the Biography Monograph series; organizing Brown Bag Biography talks; mentoring student and community work in life writing; and hosting international conferences and visiting scholars.
Stanley Schab
Managing Editor Emeritus
Stanley Schab was the managing editor of the Center for Biographical Research for twenty-two years. In this position, he ran every aspect of the journal Biography, which became the most prestigious venue for publication in the field of life writing. He was also responsible for the coordination of the center’s weekly Brown Bag speaker series, in addition to supervising the center’s volunteers and student employees. He retired officially in October 2016.
Anjoli Roy
Previous Managing Editor
Former Graduate Assistants
Zoë Sprott
Janet J. Graham
Aiko Yamashiro
Sam Ikehara