Sharon Berg is a not only a poet, but a story writer, a book reviewer, an academic, an editor, a book designer, and a publisher. She ran the online magazine Big Pond Rumours and its associated chapbook press between January 2006 and December 2019. She has taken a hiatus in order to focus on her own writing and promote her latest book.

         Left to right, Kirsten, Sharon and Ila (Kirsten’s Grade 8 graduation, circa 1996).

As a mother, Sharon found a way to meld her attention to her children and her goals as a writer. It hasn’t always been a perfect fit, but Sharon is intends to voice parts of daily living that are often over-looked or neglected in the work of many authors while voicing the need for human alignment with the forces of nature in dealing with our spiritual and ecological bereavement.

Sharon established a career as an author in the late 1970s and 1980s. She began by publishing in periodicals across Canada,  such as Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, Event, The Cross Canada Writer’s Quarterly and Tamarack Review. She has since added other periodicals like Two Hawk’s Quarterly, Former People’s Journal, and Eunoia Review. To date, her work is published in quarterlies and reviews in the USA, Mexico, the U.K., The Netherlands, and Australia.

Sharon Berg’s most up-to-date publishing news is that she has a chapter on Wandering Spirit Survival School (WSSS) in an academic text titled Alternative Schooling: Canadian Stories of Democracy within Bureaucracy. The editors are Nina Bascia, Esther Fine & Malcolm Levin and it was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2017. This book is available through Amazon or Chapters/Indigo. WSSS was founded as the first Native Way school in Canada in 1976 by Cree Elder Pauline Shirt, and it was adopted by the Toronto School Board in 1977.

In addition, Sharon’s poem Prophesy appears in the anthology Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, edited by James Deahl, published by Lummox Press, USA, 2018. She has been active and popular as a reader at several presentations of this anthology.

Sharon’s poem Trilliums appears in Gush, a menstruation-themed anthology published by Frontenac in 2018. This is the second time that her work has appeared in a similarly-themed collection. Her poem Take this red for instance appeared in English with a Dutch translation by Maria Jacobs in Opzij, a Feminist publication from Amsterdam in December 1978.

She won 2nd prize for Poetry in the 2015 GritLit Writing Contest and read her work at the 2016 GritLit Festival in Hamilton, Ontario. Her four winning poems were also published in the 2015 GritLit Festival Chapbook.

Her latest publication is Naming the Shadows, a collection of nine short stories and two novelettes, which is released September 2019 from Porcupine’s Quill. In general terms, it might be said that her stories explore the shadows that cross over relationships and the growth that is necessary to return to the light.

Sharon Berg’s third full book of poetry is currently making its rounds and seeking a publisher, as is her book length version of The Name Unspoken, a rewriting of her 1998 M.Ed thesis for the general public.