{"id":42774,"date":"2021-03-18T09:59:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T13:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/?p=42774"},"modified":"2021-03-18T09:59:11","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T13:59:11","slug":"emily-bernard-stanley-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/2021\/03\/18\/emily-bernard-stanley-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Emily Bernard speaks at annual Stanley Stone lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Award-winning author and teacher Emily Bernard discussed the importance of teaching race, as well as the experiences that led her to write Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother\u2019s Time, My Mother\u2019s Time, and Mine<\/em> for the College of General Studies\u2019 annual Stanley Stone Distinguished Lecture<\/a>. The lecture was held virtually on March 11 to an audience of nearly 300 members of the CGS community.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Author Emily Bernard addresses the CGS community over Zoom for the annual Stanley Stone lecture.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reflecting on the cruelty and rage of the world today, Bernard said she felt inspired to write something which would uphold vulnerability as a strength.<\/p>\n

Black Is the Body<\/em>, which tells of the history of both Bernard\u2019s own ancestors and the African-American literary tradition, is told from the perspective of an imperfect being, who plans to keep learning for the rest of her life. According to Bernard, life\u2019s stories begin in relation to one another, not the individual, making it clear that the first-person point of view in the book is not herself.<\/p>\n

Bernard then introduced the theme of healing in both her lecture and in the book, when she told of her experience being hospitalized after being stabbed in a coffee shop. This experience also inspired the book because it taught her how to heal through writing and storytelling.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wrote Black Is the Body <\/em>because I believe we can build bridges with our words and only walls with our silence,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Top to bottom: Emily Bernard, CGS Dean Natalie McKnight, Rhetoric Division Chair and Associate Professor Davida Pines<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bernard\u2019s works have appeared in O Magazine, Harper\u2019s Magazine, The New Republic, Best American Essays, Best African-American Essays, Best of Creative Nonfiction<\/em>, and thenewyorker.com. Her most recent work, Black Is the Body<\/em>, has been named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio and has won the 2019 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose.\u00a0Today she is both a writer and the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.<\/p>\n

Bernard discussed the first time her writing was able to embody her identity as both a writer and a teacher. The piece, \u201cTeaching the N-Word<\/a>,\u201d allowed her to introduce uncomfortable subjects of race to a predominantly white class at the University of Vermont.<\/p>\n

Once Bernard shared the piece with her students, she found that it had achieved its role as a story \u2013 to create transparency between individuals.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all have a relationship to language. We have a relationship to race. The essay is meant to be an invitation, and it\u2019s also meant to be a democratic space where the reader and the writer come together,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Highlighting the interconnectedness of the stories of Black people, Bernard questioned the role of storytelling in the healing process of trauma. She ended the lecture with the conclusion that storytelling is vital to this process.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will continue bearing witness on the page and in the classroom to the suffering and triumphs of Black people. Because in fact, as I\u2019ve learned from my ancestors, the salve is the telling itself,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

— By Meghan Bohannon<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Award-winning author and teacher Emily Bernard discussed the importance of teaching race, as well as the experiences that led her to write Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother\u2019s Time, My Mother\u2019s Time, and Mine for the College of General Studies\u2019 annual Stanley Stone Distinguished Lecture. The lecture was held virtually on March 11 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4203,334,1,4266],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42774"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42774"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42789,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42774\/revisions\/42789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}