Emily Bernard 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 The American Scholar, Best American Essays, y Best African American Essays. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her latest book, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine (Knopf) is an extraordinary, exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race–in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way–in twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays that explore, up-close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America’s New England today. Henry Louis Gates calls it, “A major contribution.” Washington Post says it’s, “magnificent.”