Professional Bio

Stephanie Berger is a poet, educator, community organizer, and entrepreneur. She is the CEO of The Poetry Society of New York (PSNY) and co-creator with Nicholas Adamski of The Poetry Brothel and The New York City Poetry Festival, among many projects. With Jackie Braje, she co-founded Milk Press, an online community, publisher, and nurturer of poetic collaborations.

Stephanie is the author of IN THE MADAME’S HAT BOX (Dancing Girl Press, 2011) and co-author with Carina Finn of THE GREY BIRD: THIRTEEN EMOJI POEMS IN TRANSLATION (Coconut Books, 2014). Her latest collection of poetry, INTERIOR FEMME (University of Nevada Press, 2022), won the 2020 Betsey Joiner Flanagan award in poetry. Claudia Keelan calls the book a “tour de force of celebration and sorrow” that meditates upon “the burden of responsibility, inherited shame, and awesome power that comes with the object position women have occupied in the history of civilization.”

Stephanie earned a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Southern California, received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the New School, and has taught writing classes at Pace University, the New School, and through PSNY. She has received awards from New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artist Corps, Brooklyn Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, University of Nevada Press, The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and other organizations.

Stephanie’s work is largely ekphrastic, collaborative, and interactive; and it straddles the worlds of literature, theatre, activism, and public art. Please feel free to contact her here.

© Ty Cole

© Ty Cole

“Elegant, beautiful, lyrical, these poems offer verbal music that consoles, gives us a second chance, a wish to live.”
— Ilya Kaminsky

Selected Online Publications

  • AS IF I HADN’T JUST UNDRESSED INSIDE HER, IN PAINTINGS WE APPEAR IN FORESTS IN THREES, and EVEN I, WHO HAVE NO LOVER, LOVE in Interim.

  • WHY PUNISH THE WATER FOR WHAT IT NEEDS in Bellevue Literary Review (use code FreeBLR to download the issue for free).

  • BELOW HIS MONOCLE, JUST TO GIVE YOU AN IDEA, and IT DOESN’T HURT THAT SHE IS BEAUTIFUL in Painted Bride Quarterly.

  • NOTHINGLAND in Pouch Magazine.

  • ONCE HE LEFT ME FOR THE LAKE and ONLY LIGHT WHERE THE LEAVES ONCE WERE in Yes, Poetry. 

  • LIKE AN ALTAR, OR MINIMALISM and TELL IT TO THE DOCTOR, TELL IT TO THE WIND in Cosmonauts Avenue. 

  • SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE STATION in Sixth Finch. 

  • BEFORE THE COLD BITE OF THE RATTLER and MY THAT WAS FINE & THEN SHE DIED in Posit.

  • A BEAUTIFUL BOYISH INSOUCIENCE in Prelude.

  • A FRENCH COCK in The Volta. 

  • GENTLEMEN PREFER BOWS OVER DINNER in Hyperallergic.

  • AND SO IT IS BECAUSE OF THE LICHEN in The The Poetry.

  • POEM IN WHICH THE CITY IS A BALCONY, POEM IN WHICH I AM THE MELANCHOLY ARCHITECT BECAUSE THE FOUNDATION UPON WHICH I HAVE BUILT OUR LOVE HAS BEEN EATEN AWAY BY WHITE MICE, and POEM IN WHICH EVERYTHING IS THIS WAY BECAUSE THERE ARE LIGHTS in Smoking Glue Gun.

  • THREE BALLS IN MY COURT AND ONE IN THE HOLE and THE ROUGING HEART AND OTHER SUNDERANCE TALES in Smoking Glue Gun.

  • THE BEGINNING AND TWO ENDS in Bambi Muse.

  • EVERYTHING IS MOVING, BREATHING, SEETHING, AND I, THE ROBOT MOP, ALONE IN THE KITCHEN and CONVERSATION: PAWN'S EYE VIEW in Coconut.

INTERIOR FEMME

In her debut full-length collection, Stephanie Berger cracks the earth open and exposes the “woman inside.” In a sequence of poems that present variations on the Western feminine archetype, Interior Femme visits many unique locales, from cemeteries in Brooklyn to canyons in New Mexico to churches in San Diego, Paris, and Peru. Berger approaches her subjects—mothers, goddesses, whores, daughters, muses, and movie stars—from multiple angles, and through her poems she reveals historical, personal, social, environmental, and artistic viewpoints. The poems offer layered perspectives fused with multiple versions of female representation, as if to underscore the burden of responsibility, inherited shame, and awesome power that comes with the position women have occupied throughout history. Berger reveals a woman critically wounded—representing the totality of the Western feminine imaginary. Lyrically complex, sometimes surreal, and often ekphrastic in style and content, Interior Femme simultaneously offers heartbreak, laughter, comfort, and empowerment.

 

THE GREY BIRD: THIRTEEN EMOJI POEMS IN TRANSLATION

According to Dazed Digital, “‘Emoji poetry’ initially sounds like a post-ironic gimmick, but in the collaborative chapbook The Grey Bird out from Coconut Books in April, poets Finn and Berger have turned their involved ideogrammatical communication into richly unsettling reflections on love, travel, alienation, etc. Balancing the inherently modern with the timelessly lyric, Berger takes the emoji compositions from Finn and translates them into poems, most of which centre around the enigmatic ‘grey bird’.” Read more about the Emoji poems in Poetry Magazine, Bustle, Refinery 29, and Paper Magazine, and buy the book at Coconut Books.

12309784_10100712396558609_8841541455780202990_o.jpg
 

IN THE MADAME'S HAT BOX

IN THE MADAME’S HAT BOX, published in 2011 by Dancing Girl Press, is a noir, scrappy and surreal portrait of woman in grief. The poems blur the lines between subject and object, reality and representation, between the living and inanimate. Is a shadow animate? Can one fall in love with an absence?

Audio & Video

Articles & Reviews

THE POETRY BROTHEL IS AN IMMERSIVE LITERARY CABARET THAT FUSES POETRY, BURLESQUE, LIVE MUSIC, VAUDEVILLE, VISUAL ART, MAGIC, MYSTICISM, AND PRIVATE, ONE-ON-ONE POETRY EXPERIENCES. 

Inspired by the turn-of-the-century brothels in New Orleans, Paris, and Buenos Aires, many of which functioned as permissive spaces where marginalized, fringe, and avant-garde artists could experiment and perform their work, The Poetry Brothel presents a rotating cast of poets, each operating within carefully constructed characters, who share their work through staged public performances, spontaneous immersive eruptions, and, most distinctly, as purveyors of intimate poetic experiences in private spaces. Central to the experience is the creation of character, which for each artist functions as a disguise and freeing device, enabling The Poetry Brothel to be a place of uninhibited creative expression in which poets and audience members alike can communicate more authentically.

In addition to its poets, The Poetry Brothel presents artists and activists working in a variety of mediums both on stage and through its ever-changing array of intimate, interactive, and creative services. Artists performing with the Brothel are male, female, faeries, sea creatures, witches, aliens, POC, straight, queer, emerging, established, local, international, virgins, whores, and everything in between. The Poetry Brothel recognizes that not everyone can take the mask of being a “whore” off at the end of the night and therefore uses its platform to support sex workers and to teach the public that sex work is real work. Sex work and poetry are two of the oldest professions - both feed the human need for intimacy, fantasy, and desire. By entwining these elements into a seamless, immersive experience, The Poetry Brothel promotes empowered sexuality practices and progressive artistic expression by exhibiting radical inclusion, consensual intimacy, conscious communication, and the inherent value of beauty in all its forms. 

Every year on the last weekend in July, The New York City Poetry Festival unites a vast and diverse community of New Yorkers on the idyllic summer paradise of Governors Island.

The festival invites poetry organizations and collectives of all shapes and sizes to bring their unique formats, aesthetics, and personalities to the festival grounds, which are ringed with a collection of beautiful Victorian houses and tucked beneath the wide, green canopies of dozens of century old trees. The purpose of the New York City Poetry Festival is to liberate New York poets and their work from the dark corners of bars, bookstores, and universities. By uniting the largest community of poets in the country and offering a unique setting for literary activity, the New York City Poetry Festival electrifies arts and literature and brings poetry to new light in the public eye. 

“FROM A DISTANCE, THE SMALL, NARROW BOOTH RESEMBLES A CONFESSIONAL.”

-THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Typewriter Project is a series of site-specific installations which invite passersby to join in a communal, poetic exchange that exists in both analog and digital forms.

These typewriter booths are each outfitted with a vintage typewriter, 100-foot long paper scroll, and a custom-built USB Typewriter™ kit, which allows every keystroke to be collected, stored, and posted online for users to read, share, and comment upon. The project is largely inspired by the idea of an Exquisite Corpse, a surrealist writing game in which several authors contribute to one poem. Obviously each entry in The Typewriter Project can be its own distinct lyric, but we hope that users will also be influenced by what was written before them on the scroll. By creating a new and unique form of public dialogue, this project hopes to capture something of the sound, narrative, and nuance of specific corners of the city. The Typewriter Project’s mission is to investigate, document, and preserve the poetic subconscious of the city while providing a fun and interactive means for the public to engage with the written word.

Milk Press

imageedit_2_8915508724.jpg

Launched in 2018, Milk Press merges the poetry and visual art worlds by cultivating and presenting exclusively collaborative works. Milk publishes poems and visual art both in print and online and hosts multi-disciplinary Happenings. Milk projects are fluid, nourishing, embodied; spilt and split-open.

milkpresspress.jpg

Brothel Books

Brothel Books was the short-lived publishing arm of The Poetry Brothel. The Poetry Brothel has long been a proponent of bringing poetry to the masses–-exclusively, and with absolute discretion. Likewise, Brothel Books, published the most intimate, most charming, and most crafted works by The Poetry Brothel’s poets across the globe. Below is the list of titles, all of which are still available for purchase.

 

TWO GENIUS HUSBANDS

TWO GENIUS HUSBANDS is a play by Carina Finn that premiered at Dixon Place, edited & produced by Stephanie Berger. A queer & experimental farce, TWO GENIUS HUSBANDS investigates the possibility of genius and the simultaneous impossibility of geniuses. In Two Genius Husbands, Q & Q, a pair of genius husbands, are rewriting Aeschylus’ lost tragedy, Callisto. A queer take on Beckettian theater and Greek tragedy, this is the play that dares to ask: what is the difference between desire and domesticity? What is the difference between a bear and the mother of a bear? The premiere of TWO GENIUS HUSBANDS was directed by Kate Attwell, and starred Ceci Fernandez, Monique Barbee, Molly Bernard, and Mitchell Winter. 

 

YOLO

YOLO was a conceptual photo-poetry book collaboration between Brandon Johnson, Sean Patrick Cain, Carina Finn, and Stephanie Berger on the short-lived #wtfislongsdrugspress. The project investigates the phrase "You Only Live Once" in contrast to its carpe diem contemporary pop usage as an ultra-conventional moment mori literary trope presented in the unconventional literary medium of a photographic series. Featuring an inscribed granite headstone positioned in public locations through the city of New York, it’s Charles Baudelaire x Ed Ruscha. Antediluvian literary motif presented through photo-based conceptualism. Ye Olde Grandfather Literature gone meme. In memoriam. #YOLO

The "book" consisted of a series of 27 5x7" photos in a disposable-style hand-made paper packaging stamped with silver ink and sealed with a wax fleur-de-lis.