Kai Bird

Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and journalist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006 for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin). American Prometheus is the basis for Christopher Nolan’s recent film, Oppenheimer. Bird is the Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. His book, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, was a New York Times best-seller and his most recent work is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. His memoir is called Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis and he also authored multiple biographies. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, Nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the CIA. He won the National Books Critics Circle Award, the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.