Events

Emily Bernard in conversation with Lis Harris, Writing.

Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Mother's Time and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Black is the Body won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Emily’s previous books include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age; and, with Deborah Willis, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, which received a 2010 NAACP Image Award. Her work has appeared in: Harper’s, TLS, The New Republic, The New Yorker, O the Oprah Magazine, Image, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Emily was the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont, with her husband and twin daughters.

About the Nonfiction Dialogues

The Nonfiction Dialogues is a student-initiated evening series in which Professor and Writing Program Chair Lis Harris interviews distinguished nonfiction writers about their work and careers. Recent guests have included Robert Boyers, Lewis Hyde, Amitava Kumar, Terese Marie Mailhot, and Maggie Nelson.