CHRISTINA BERKE MFA M.Ed. is a Chilean-American writer and educator based in the Los Angeles area (Chumash territory) with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing.

She is the inaugural Carol Shields Prize Foundation Residency Fellow and a 2022 Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award Recipient in Nonfiction. Her fiction manuscript, based on her maternal family’s history during the 1973 military coup in Chile, won Honorable Mention for the 2022 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writers Fellowship. A former Managing Editor for Black Mountain Institute’s award-winning literary magazine, Witness, she now reads memoir submissions for Split Lip Magazine and Best of the Net. She’s served as a juried reader for various writing contests and residencies.

Her writing has been supported by the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where she studied with Melissa Febos, the Kenyon Review Teacher’s Workshop, VONA, Tin House and elsewhere. She’s been awarded residencies with Hedgebrook, Storyknife, Ragdale, and Vermont Studio Center. She was a Distinguished Nonfiction finalist with Lighthouse’s Emerging Writer Fellowship, a Finalist for the Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship, a Semi-Finalist for the Grub Street Emerging Writer Fellowship, and a Semi-Finalist for a Fulbright Fellowship.

Christina is working on a memoir, WELL, BODY, an excerpt of which was Longlisted with Disquiet Literary International and received Honorable Mention with the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowships and was a Finalist with Fractured Lit.

Her work is in The Sun, Lidia Yuknavitch’s Khora, Off Assignment, The Master’s Review, Pithead Chapel, Teen Vogue, Edible, MQR, Gulf Coast, Catapult, The Rumpus, NPR’s Desert Companion, Apartment Therapy, PopSugar, Stylecaster and elsewhere.

A former middle school English teacher and international private educator with a Masters in Education from UCLA, she earned her B.A. at UC Berkeley. Christina is an Adjunct Professor of English and teaches creative writing classes online and within her community. She loves dogs and sound baths.