I was born in Colorado and got my BA in English from Colorado State University. I came to California immediately afterwards, where I received my MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and became a full-time writer. I lived in San Francisco for many years and in 2000 moved with my wife to the rural redwoods of Sonoma County.

In the early days, I wrote for music magazines (Puncture, Option, Magnet, Ray Gun, huH) and local arts papers -- SFWeekly and San Francisco Bay Guardian -- and sold reviews and musical news features to the SF Gate and Pink Section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

When Wired launched in 1993, I began to contribute CD reviews, short articles and, eventually, interviews and features to the magazine, on everything from Negativland and Björk to Internet gaming and visual art. Wired hired me as a contributing editor in 1997. Through my connections there, I also wrote music and travel pieces for HotWired and contributed to projects for Wired Books. Under my editorship, I produced the Wired Presents: Music Futurists CD for Rhino Records. In 1996, work I did at Wired was nominated for a Music Journalism Award.

But I had other interests. I wrote two early Internet books for Sybex: A Pocket Tour of Music on the Internet (1995) and A Pocket Tour of Celebrities on the Internet (1996); these were translated into Japanese, Greek, Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Chinese. I also wrote and edited three San Francisco travel guides: two for London-based Time Out -- Time Out San Francisco 1998 and Time Out San Francisco 2000 (Penguin) -- and a third, Gayot's Best of San Francisco and Northern California, for Gault-Milau in 1998. In 1995 I contributed to bOING bOING's The Happy Mutant Handbook (Riverhead) and in 1996 published a series of technology columns in the Newark [NJ] Star-Ledger.

Beginning in the late 1990's, I was hired to write and edit business content for a number of companies, including Wells Fargo Bank, Sun Microsystems, Inc., HP, Scient, Modulant Solutions, Center for the Future of China, White Rabbit Virtual, Ninth House Networks, and many others.

I grew more interested in visual culture and fine art, and in 1999 was hired as Citysearch San Francisco's art critic. I wrote more than 100 reviews and short features for the site, seeking out the city's best gallery and museum shows and art events. I wrote about graffiti, public, emerging, and "alternative" art -- stuff that had always been the most intriguing to me. As a result of my work at Citysearch, I was hired as Editor-in-Chief of ArtSpan's 2000 Open Studios Guide.

My experience with visual stories led me in other directions. I was invited to write for Print, the New York-based graphic design magazine, where I became a contributing editor in 2001. (Print has won the National Magazine Award for general excellence four times, most recently in 2008.) I also wrote for LINE, Art Papers, Art Connoisseur, Sphere and, eventually, eDesign, Surface, I.D., Artweek (where I was a contributing editor for five years), CMYK, the AIGA's Voice, and Preservation, the official magazine of the National Historic Trust.

Along the way, I've published my creative work -- short stories and memoirs -- in a variety of places, including: Transfer, On the Page, Tiny Lights (where my memoir "Chew" was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize), and The Dickens literary magazines; the Zebulon Nights anthology (Word Riot Press, 2003), and the Fresh California Oranges and Other True Life Stories anthology (Trafford, 2005). I've read my work to live audiences at KGB Bar in Manhattan; the Sonoma County Book Fair in Santa Rosa; the LiveWire Literary Salon in Petaluma; KRCB-FM; and KWMR-FM's "Turning Pages" programs. I've also read commentaries on KQED Public Radio and on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Speaking of radio, I've produced and sold a number of reported pieces, CD reviews, and commentaries to different radio entities including "All Things Considered" and KQED's "The California Report" (where a segment I wrote and co-produced won a 2004 RTNDA Award). I was a contributing producer for "Word By Word," an NEA-supported literary program produced by Jordan Rosenfeld on KRCB-FM.

Topic-wise, I like to keep in motion: I've sold cooking features to Delicious Living, technology stories to Golf Journal, and independent film reviews to Entertainment Weekly. I wrote a couple of essays for Steven Heller in Allworth Press's Education of a Comics Artist and the second edition of Education of a Graphic Designer, and the anchoring essay for Chronicle Books' Shag: The Art of Josh Agle. "Urban Emigrants" was a weekly column series for the SF Gate. Last year I published my first feature -- a memoir -- in the awesome Make magazine, which they later released as a podcast.

I've appeared as a guest at conferences, panels, and programs, including KUSF-FM's "Radio Segue" (1995); the Music Journalism Awards (1996); American Public Media's "Marketplace" program (1997); SummerFest La Jolla (1998); HANG gallery's "Business of Online Art" (2000); as a speaker at the HOW Design Conference (2004); Sonoma State University's "State of the Arts" panel series (2006); the Sonoma County Book Festival (2003, 2004, 2005); on KQED's "Forum" (2006) and KRON 4's "News Weekend" with Henry Tenenbaum (2006). In 2002, I began appearing as a guest lecturer and workshop facilitator in writing classes at San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley Extension, and the California College of Art.

For me, writing is the best way to directly address the world. For fifteen years I've written and published short stories, memoirs, journalism, essays, criticism, and commercial content, seeking to communicate complex ideas to my audiences. So far, I seem to have achieved some degree of success.

 

© 2008 Colin Berry, colinberry.com.