Venise Berry’s creative publication record includes three national bestselling novels; So Good, An African American Love Story (1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (2000), and Colored Sugar Water (2002). She completed a book of essays Driven: Reflections on Love, Career, and the Pursuit of Happiness in October 2018 and is currently working on her fourth novel, Pockets of Sanity. Each winter, Berry serves as faculty in the Solstice MFA low-residency creative writing program in Boston, and every summer, she offers writing workshops at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
Venise Berry is a Journalism and African American Studies professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and DEO of African American Studies. Her academic research focuses on media, African Americans, and popular culture. The current book project is Racialism and the Media: Black Jesus, Black Twitter, and the First Black American President (Peter Lang, June 2020). She is also the co-editor of an anthology with Peter Lang, Black Culture & Experience: Contemporary Issues (2015). Plus, she co-authored two non-fiction books about the film – The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2007 & 2nd Ed. 2015) and The 50 Most Influential Black Films (Citadel 2001).
Okoboji Writers’ Retreat Topics:
- Writing for Social Change
- Elements of Fiction: Plots and Subplots
- Writing Strategies: Clarity and Depth