Emily Bernard

Profile

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a BA and PhD in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in TLS, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Harper’s, O the Oprah Magazine, the Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxford American, and Ploughshares. 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. Her most recent book, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, won the 2020 LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. 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 The American Scholar, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, she lives in South Burlington, Vermont, with her husband John Gennari and their twin daughters. At our Winter 2020 program residency at VCFA, she served as the Visiting Writer in Creative Nonfiction. www.emilybernard.com