2024 James Weldon Johnson Memorial Lecture, “Love the Blood: Carl Van Vechten, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Pleasures of Civil Disagreement” by Emily Bernard

Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Bernard is the winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Her books include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a 2024-2025 Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellow, Bernard is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the 2024-2025 Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Lecture is organized by Beinecke Library in conjunction with the Department of African American Studies at Yale.