Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

Black History Month

Staff recommendations, guest essays, and curated reading lists.

Winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Kirkus Reviews

One of Maureen Corrigan’s 10 Unputdownable Reads of the Year

In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it. “Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably….Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.”

"Contemplative and compassionate...Bernard's voice is personable yet incisive in exploring the lived reality of race...[Her] wisdom and compassion radiate throughout this collection." Publishers Weekly

"Of the 12 essays here, there's not one that even comes close to being forgettable….Bernard proves herself to be a revelatory storyteller of race in America..." Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

"...one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read….I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

Emily Bernard was born and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and received her PhD in American studies from Yale University. She has been the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the NEH, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Resident Fellowship at Harvard University. Her essays have been published in journals and anthologies, among them The American Scholar, Best American Essays, and Best African American Essays. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.