Rose Marie Berger

Rose Marie Berger, author of Who Killed Donte Manning? The Story of an American Neighborhood, is a Catholic peace activist, writer, and poet. She has covered her diverse “spirituality, art, and justice” beat from locations as far afield as the Catholic-Protestant dividing line in Belfast, a coca farm in southern Colombia, a Serb stronghold in Sarajevo, the presidential palace in Venezuela and the Kentucky farm of agrarian essayist Wendell Berry.

Rose has a veteran history in social justice activism, including: educating and training groups in nonviolence; leading retreats in spirituality and justice; and writing on a wide range of topics related to faith, politics, and culture. She is a regular columnist for Sojourners on issues of spirituality and justice; and a sought after speaker, retreat leader, poet, author, and interviewer.

Her writing has appeared on the Religion News Service and in Sojourners magazine, Publishers Weekly, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (2008), Conversations with Wendell Berry (2007), The Revolution: A Field Manual for Changing Your World (2006) and The Impossible Will Take A Little While (2004).

As a creative writer with her MFA in poetry from the University of Southern Maine, Rose has had her creative work published in Sojourners magazine, The Journal of South African Feminism, Beltway, The Other Side, Radix, and D.C. Poets Against the War anthology, and other publications. In 2007, she co-edited with Joseph Ross, Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib Paintings.

Her most recent book Who Killed Donté Manning?: The Story of an American Neighborhoood was published in 2010 by Apprentice House press in Baltimore. Set in the inner-city Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. where she lives, Donte Manning is the spiritual memoir of a neighborhood that sprung from the murder of a 3rd-grade boy. “[Donte Manning] provided a brand-new context for my own ruminations about half-hearted justice and wasted lives. It invested seemingly fragmentary events with a sense of urgency. And it charged the familiar with grace and meaning,” writes artist Brett Busang.

Rose also has an engaging online presence through Facebook, Twitter, and through her own blog at www.rosemarieberger.com.

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