Louise W. Knight is a biographer, author and lecturer. Her first biography, about Jane Addams's formative years, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2005. Her second book, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action, the first full-life biography of Addams in 37 years, was published by W. W. Norton in 2010. Knight has contributed essays on Jane Addams to three edited collections, written for the Huffington Post, the Nation, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal, and published essays in scholarly journals. She has appeared on radio and TV, including on C-Span, and lectured widely, including Harvard University, Princeton University, and at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She has also presented papers at the Society for Intellectual History, Society for History of the Early Republic, and the Organization of American Studies, among others. In 2000 she received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities, and in 2007 Citizen received the Russell P. Strange Memorial Award for best book on Illinois history from the Illinois State Historical Society. A visiting scholar in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University, she is currently writing a dual biography of the abolitionist-feminist Grimké sisters, to be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.She lives in Evanston, Illinois.