Ryan Berg
“It's hard to build empathy through statistics. That's what stories are for.”
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“With this book, Berg reminds us how radical and compassionate an act storytelling can be. Not since Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family have I been so impressed with a writer’s ability to show us unseen lives, with grace, respect, and clarity.”
“Compelling.... Berg’s extraordinary talent is his portrayal of the human dimension. These are teenagers with the same anxieties, frustrations, interests, hopes, and desires as teenagers (and others) everywhere, but they also face bullying beyond what would break most... The resilience of Raheem, Bella, Rodrigo, and others profiled is so astonishing that it is impossible not to be amazed.”
Ryan Berg is the author of No House to Call My Home: Love, Family and Other Transgressions (Nation Books, 2015), winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction, the 2016 NCCD Media for a Just Society Award, and listed as a Top 10 LGBTQ Book of 2016 by the American Library Association. A prominent journalist and well-known activist, he has traveled the country speaking out and engaging communities in discussions about the issue of LGBTQ homelessness.
Reflecting on how little news coverage and mobilization he’s seen around LGBTQ youth homelessness in general, Berg wonders, “Where's the community outrage? People often don’t want to read about tragedy unless there is redemption in the end? Then we need to create that redemption. If we mobilized half as much and showed half the ingenuity as we did in the fight for marriage equality, the LGBTQ community, and their allies, could make a real impact on LGBTQ youth homelessness. These young people have had to face enough indignities. They shouldn’t have to face erasure and neglect from their own community.”
Berg received the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer’s Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Slate, Chronicle for Social Change, The Advocate, Salon, Local Knowledge, The Rumpus, and The Sun. He has been awarded residencies from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. For his youth work he has received the True Community Award from the True Colors Fund and the Lavender Community Award (LGBTQ Advocacy) from Lavender Magazine. He is the program manager for the ConneQT Host Home Program of Avenues for Homeless Youth, and lives in Minneapolis.
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