April Bernard

• Name — April Bernard • Born — 1956 • Birthplace — New England, U.S. • Occupation — Poet • Education — Harvard University

Bernard was born and raised in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her father, Walter Bernard, held a BA from the University of New Hampshire and a PhD from MIT. For many years he was a research scientist at Sprague Electric. Her mother, Claire, was a teacher, writer and librarian who taught 5th and 6th grade at the local elementary school. Bernard graduated from Mt. Greylock Regional High School in 1974. She attended Harvard University, earning a BA magna cum laude in History and Literature in 1978. At Harvard, Bernard was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was the recipient of several awards, including the Sonier Thesis Prize in History and Literature, the Untermeyer Poetry Prize, and the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. She earned a master's degree from Yale University in 1981.

She has worked as a senior editor at Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Manhattan, inc. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books. In 2017, Bernard was deputy editor of US Magazine.

In the early 1990s, Bernard taught at Amherst College. She later taught at writing at as part of the MFA program at Bennington College from 1999 to 2009. In Fall 2003, Bernard was the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. She is a professor of English and director of creative writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In 1981, Bernard married Peter Craig Freeman, the director of the Blum-Heiman Gallery in New York. Bernard later was married to writer Marc Robinson. She has a son, Henry Robinson.

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