Steve Berman

Biography

Berman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in an affluent suburb in southern New Jersey. Berman realized by junior high school he was gay. Years later, Berman chronicled his first homosexual experience, which occurred while he was away at college, in the creative essay "Coming Out 101: Final Exam." Despite the title of this piece, Berman remained closeted from family and friends until after he graduated with his first undergraduate degree.

He attended first Tulane University, earning a bachelor's degree in English literature, then later studied History at Rutgers–Camden campus in Camden, New Jersey as well as a master's degree in Liberal Studies in 2006. He worked in the publishing industry, both as a senior book buyer at an academic and then trade wholesaler, and in the marketing department of the Jewish Publication Society, a small religious press in Philadelphia.

One of the most influential relationships in his life began through d8 Magazine, a shortly-lived periodical devoted to roleplaying gaming culture, when he met Holly Black. A few weeks later, Berman took an editorial assistant position with the medical publishing company Churchill Livingstone in New York City, where Black also, coincidentally, worked. The two developed a long and abiding friendship and remain critique partners to this day.

Berman is a former member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and one of the few lifetime members of the RPGA (many of his early publications involved roleplaying games, notably the second edition of Dungeons & Dragons). Most of his short fiction could be considered dark fantasy, horror, urban fantasy, and weird autofiction.

In 2001, Berman founded Lethe Press. The first few titles included his first short story collection, Trysts, and several books in the public domain. In 2004, he met author Toby Johnson through an online newsgroup devoted to queer writers. He offered to reprint Johnson's award-winning book, Gay Spirituality.

He attended the Clarion East 2006 class, the last year that workshop was held in East Lansing, Michigan. Unlike many graduates of the program, Berman has noted that his experience there was detrimental to his career and that the workshop hampers creativity and can be emotionally damaging to writers who are neither fast nor skilled at first drafts. He was a participant in the now-defunct Nameless Workshop, based in the Philadelphia region, which included such writers as Judith Berman, Victoria McManus, John Schoffstall, and Ann Zeddies.

Though raised Jewish, Berman wavers between Jewish secularism and Atheism.

As of May 2013, he has sold over 100 articles, essays, and short stories, many of them dealing with queer speculative fiction. Several of his urban fantasy stories are set in the Fallen Area. Berman has been a finalist seven times for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards and four times (as editor) for the Lambda Literary Award. His first novel, Vintage: A Ghost Story was released in 2007 and was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award. In June 2009, he launched the quarterly publication, Icarus, the Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction, which ended in October 2013.

In August of 2017, Berman moved to Massachusetts.

As editor