Jacqueline Berger

Her third book, The Gift That Arrives Broken (2010), won the Autumn House Poetry Award. The title originates from a deleted line in a poem that reflected a new closeness with her family at a time when her mother and father were both ill.

Things That Burn (2005), her second book of poetry, was awarded the 2004 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry by Mark Strand, United States Poet Laureate (1990–1991). It was published by the University of Utah Press. In Things That Burn, Berger uses narrative poetry to explore the ambient nature of feeling: "I want to use both story and language to enter the place where experience is atmospheric—the blue or red smoke of the soul, if you will."

She married technical writer Jeffrey Erickson in 2004.

In the mid-2000s, she participated in the Changing Lives Through Literature program, teaching prisoners at the San Mateo Women's Correctional Facility.

Her first book of poetry, The Mythologies of Danger (1997), won the Bluestem Poetry Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award. American author Alberto Ríos, the final judge at the Bluestem competition, described Mythologies of Danger as "poems of immediate human energy and willful edge...Always bold but always thoughtful too...a smart, compelling move into the speaker's world of charged moments, sparks, which here are always dangerous and ingenuously engaging."

Her poetry has been published in two anthologies of American literature: "Grandfather" was included in On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists (1995); "Getting to Know Her", "The Gun", and "Between Worlds" were published in American Poetry: The Next Generation (2000). Berger's poems have also appeared in Poetry Flash, Rhino Poetry and River Styx Magazine.

Since the late 1990s, she has been the Program Director for the Master of Arts in English at Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU) in Belmont, California. Berger is also an assistant professor and director of the writing center at NDNU and teaches writing at City College of San Francisco. She draws inspiration from the dependent relationship between her teaching and writing career: "I really adore teaching, and it certainly inspires me. And I couldn’t teach writing if I didn't write. So the two certainly work together."

Berger was born in Los Angeles and received her BA in English from Goddard College in 1982. She studied under Olga Burmas and Jane Miller at Goddard, and later became interested in free writing and attended the Freehand Women's Writing Community in Massachusetts. Berger obtained her MFA from Mills College in 1995.

Jacqueline Lisa Berger (born November 30, 1960) is an American poet and director of the graduate English program at Notre Dame de Namur University in California. She is the author of three books of narrative poetry: The Mythologies of Danger (1997), Things That Burn (2005), and The Gift That Arrives Broken (2010). Her work is concerned with the themes of desire and loss.