YSPH SBS Virtual 526 Seminar Series: Venise Berry, “Racialism and the Media: Stereotypes, Biased Frames, Historical Myths and Traditional Racism”

Venise Berry is an associate professor of Journalism and African American Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Her academic research focuses on media, African Americans and popular culture. Her current book 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). And co-author of two non-fiction books about film - The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2007 & 2^nd Ed. 2015) and The 50 Most Influential Black Films (Citadel 2001). Berry is the author of three national bestselling novels; So Good, An African American Love Story (1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (2000) and Colored Sugar Water (2002). Driven: Reflections on Love, Career and the Pursuit of Happiness (October 2018) was published by Jewell Jordan/BerryBooks. Her fourth novel, Pockets of Sanity will be released in 2022. In October of 2018 she was given an Iowa History Makers Award from the African American Museum in Cedar Rapids Iowa. In 2003, she received the "Creative Contribution to Literature" award for Colored Sugar Water from the Zora Neale Hurston Society. All of Me received a 2001 Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Berry’s first co-edited anthology, Mediated Messages and African-American Culture: Contemporary Issues (Sage, 1996), won the Meyers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997.