Book club meeting to discuss the first half of the book: Wednesday, May 12, 6:30 pm. Register on Zoom.
Q&A with the author: Wednesday, May 26, 6:30pm. Register on Zoom.
We are relaunching our book club with UVM professor Emily Bernard’s wonderful book Black is the Body. This series of interconnected essays follow Dr. Bernard’s life, from growing up in the South to adopting her daughters in Ethiopia to teaching at majority-white schools like UVM. With insights on American culture, parenthood, marriage, and—of course—race, the book is an engrossing memoir and meditation on the world we live in.
We are delighted to be bringing Dr. Bernard to a virtual Q&A to wrap up our book club discussion! Please join us for one or both events. All are welcome, but preregistration is required.
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 works 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: O the Oprah Magazine, Harper’s, The New Republic, newyorker.com, 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 James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont, and a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont with her husband and twin daughters.
Rutland Area Branch of the NAACP 