Emily Bernard

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxtford American, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and theatlantic.com. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. When discussing her latest book, Black is the Body: Stories from my Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, Fresh Air called her, "A revelatory storyteller of race in America who can hold her own with some of those great writers she teaches."

She has received fellowships and grants from Yale University, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, and The MacDowell Colony. A contributing editor at Image and The American Scholar, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Black is the Body won the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose in the Los Angeles Times 2020 Book Prizes competition. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily lives in South Burlington with her husband John, twin daughters Isabella and Giulia.