Evening Book Group: Black is the Body
The SBPL Evening Book Group meets in the Community Room on the 4th Thursday of every month. Enjoy a stimulating conversation about books and exchange perspectives about characters and plot while getting to know your neighbors. Join us in February as we talk about Black is the Body, by South Burlington author and UVM professor Emily Bernard.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose
An NPR and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
One of Maureen Corrigan's 10 Unputdownable Reads of the Year
“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.”
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.
"Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." --Elizabeth Gilbert
This book is available to borrow from the library. Book group reserve copies will be available one month ahead of the discussion.
Discussion will be hybrid, with in-person and Zoom options. Zoom participants should join the meeting no later than 5:55pm to be admitted.
Please email sbplprograms@southburlingtonvt.gov or call 802-846-4140 if you have questions or would like to be added to the email list for this group, or if you would like to attend via Zoom.
