Emily Bernard (born 1967) is an American writer and the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is a contributing editor to The American Scholar.
The 2004 anthology Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendships, was edited and introduced by Bernard. She is the author of books including Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White (2010) and Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, which won the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose in 2019. The essay collection Black Is the Body was among Maureen Corrigan's "Favorite Books of 2019", and Kirkus Reviews described it as "A rare book of healing on multiple levels."
Awards and recognition
2001: The New York Times Notable Book of the Year for Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
2006: New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age for Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship
2008–09: James Weldon Johnson Fellowship in African American Studies, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library