May 19: Poetry & Prose with Emily Bernard and Nicholas Regiacorte

The English and Creative Writing Department warmly invites you to the Cleopatra Mathis Poetry and Prose Series on Thursday, May 19, 2022, with readings from Emily Bernard and Nicholas Regiacorte. The event will start at 6:30 p.m. in Sanborn Library (view on campus map).

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. Black is the Body won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Emily's previous books include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 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; and, with Deborah Willis, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, which received a 2010 NAACP Image Award. Her work has appeared in: Harper's, TLS, The New Republic, The New Yorker, O the Oprah Magazine, Image, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Emily was the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont, with her husband and twin daughters.

Nicholas Regiacorte earned his MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa, where he was a Paul Engle fellow. Since that time, he's lived in Italy twice, once on a Fulbright year in Campania, the second time as a Visiting Professor in Florence. His poems have appeared in 14 Hills, Copper Nickel, Mary, New American Writing, Descant, Bennington Review, Colorado Review and elsewhere. A finalist for numerous prizes, including Rescue Press, New Issues, and Cleveland State's first book prize, American Massif is his first book. He currently teaches at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, where he directs the Program in Creative Writing.