Venise Berry I want to inspire you to think critically, write creatively, and live successfully Company: BerryBooks Location: Coralville, Iowa Website: www.veniseberry.com

Biography:
Venise Berry is a talented and entertaining national speaker. Currently an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, she received her BA (1977) in Journalism and her MA (1979) in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. Her Ph.D. was awarded in Radio. TV and Film at the University of Texas in Austin (1989). She is the author of three bestselling novels, So Good, An African American Love Story (Dutton/Penguin, 1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (Dutton/Penguin, 2000) and Colored Sugar Water (Dutton/Penguin, 2002) and has received a number of awards.

In 2001, All of Me was selected for an Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and Berry received an Iowa Author Award from the Public Library Foundation of Des Moines that same year. In 2003, she was honored by the Zora Neale Hurston Society for her “Creative Contribution to Literature.” Her fourth novel, Still So Good, a sequel to So Good, was released in 2006. Berry is also published widely in academic circles with numerous articles on rap music, youth and popular culture.

She is the co-author of two non-fiction books with S. Torriano Berry, an associate professor in Film at Howard University, The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2006) and The 50 Most Influential Black Films (Citadel, 2001). Her co-edited book, Mediated Messages and African-American Culture: Contemporary Issues (Sage, 1996) won the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997. Each summer, Berry teaches a one-week workshop on novel writing at the University of Iowa Summer Writers Festival.

Workshops – Seminars – Presentations:
* Weight and Wellness: Challenging Myths
* Racialism and the Media
* Success in the 21st Century
* I Used to be a Rap Music Fan
* Words That Set Us Free
* Powerful Plots: A Blueprint for Good Novels

Availability:
Available for the folowing: Workshop with interactive exercises and discussion, lecture with question and answer segment, book reading and signing or a combination of all three. Sessions can be scheduled from one hour to several days depending on your needs.