the Authors
Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan
The biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have spent decades in the art and publishing worlds of New York, Mark as a veteran art critic and Annalyn as the former arts editor of Newsweek and a former music critic.
Their first book, de Kooning: An American Master, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2005, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book award for biography. The New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of 2005.
The authors live in New York City. They have two daughters, two cats, and one grandson.
Mark Stevens
Photo: Elena Seibert, 2020
Mark Stevens was the art critic for Newsweek between 1977 and 1988 and then moved to The New Republic (1988-95) and New York Magazine (1995-2006). He is the author of a novel, Summer in the City (1984), and he has written numerous essays for books, art magazines, and catalogues, most recently an essay for Jenny Saville (Rizzoli, 2018) and one for Francis Bacon: Late Paintings (Gagosian, 2015).
Stevens has also written for many general interest publications, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he has served for many years on the advisory council of the Princeton University Art Museum, and of King’s College, Cambridge.
In 2007-08, Mark was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, which enabled him to begin work on the biography of Francis Bacon.
Annalyn Swan
Photo: Elena Seibert, 2020
Annalyn Swan is a former senior arts editor of Newsweek. She began her career as a writer at Time, then joined Newsweek in 1980 as music critic and subsequently became the magazine’s arts editor. From 1986 to 1990 she was editor-in-chief of Savvy magazine, an upscale women’s business publication, and, from 1990 to 2005, divided her time between writing and serving as a consulting editor for major media companies, including Time Inc. and Gruner and Jahr. She taught biographical and memoir writing at Princeton University in 2013, and currently teaches in the Biography and Memoir M.A. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as at Breadloaf Middlebury School of English.
A graduate of Princeton University and a Marshall Scholar, she earned her master’s degree at King’s College, Cambridge University. She is a former trustee of Princeton University and the former head of the Advisory Council of Princeton’s English Department and of the Princeton Alumni Weekly board. She is also a trustee emeritus of The Daily Princetonian (she was the paper’s first woman editor-in-chief) and a member of the board of the Works and Process series at the Guggenheim Museum. She has written for numerous publications, including The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, and contributed to catalogs and collections of essays, among them The Lives of the Piano. She is the winner of an Ascap-Deems Taylor award and a Front Page Award for her music criticism.