Venise Berry, “Writing with Ethnic Diversity”

Venise Berry offers advice on how to "bring the world into your writing." Berry advises writers to leave their own comfort zone of familiar communities and characters and purposely inject voices from a wide spectrum of experience. Berry asserts that a writer's job is to help the audience learn by making realistic, diverse characters "accountable to society."

Listen: Venise Berry presents "Writing with Ethnic Diversity" at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, 6/26/07

Caryl Pagel introduces the Venise Berry's presentation.

Venise Berry is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and African American Studies at The University of Iowa. She is the author of three national 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). She is currently at work on her next two novels: Pockets of Sanity and Career Women. All of Me received an Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Berry is the recipient of an Iowa Author Award from the Public Library Foundation of Des Moines, and The Zora Neale Hurston Society has recognized her "Creative Contribution to Literature." For more information, visit Venise Berry's website at www.veniseberry.com.

To subscribe to this podcast through iTunes, select the "Advanced" menu, and click "Subscribe to Podcast." Paste the following web address, and click "Okay."

http://at-lamp.its.uiowa.edu/virtualwu/index.php/main/iTunesRSS/

July 02, 2007
Fiction | Summer Writing Festival Email this article

Next entry: Marilyn Abildskov - "Leap: Imagination in Nonfiction"
Previous entry: Marc Nieson, "Making Words Count"