Stephen Michael Berberich

Stephen Michael Berberich’s wide-ranging news and feature reporting has covered sciences from gardening to biotechnology and from agricultural research in West Africa to pharmacokinetics in West Baltimore. From broadcast and newspaper experiences comes his novel Fatal Deadline, both a mystery and a spoof of hard-knocks reporters with nothing going for them except getting the big scoop, an exclusive, or an expose for 24 hours of fame and a bit of truth for the community. From Berberich's leisure life comes his novel Night at the Belvedere, taken from a millennium party at a dinosaur hotel, December 31, 1999, where a clearly out-of-place little old man in a brown trench coat dashed mysteriously through the festive crowd of black tuxedos and evening gowns. In Belvedere, the man in a flash becomes an escaped convict bent on killing famed political reformer, Baltimore’s Charles Bonaparte, 100 years earlier. Berberich carries into fiction his only ambition in life: to use his gift with words to help people learn and to be entertained. The sports editor for his high school paper, broadcast journalist in college, Berberich then began his career as a garden columnist and then covered earth sciences for such periodicals as Agriculture Research, Outdoor America, South (the Third World magazine), Earth Times, and American Farmland. He reported news and feature stories for the Journal newspaper chain in Washington, D.C. and business news for The Gazette, a weekly with desks in seven counties in Maryland. In his early years as a national news editor at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Berberich won federal awards for publications, merit awards from both the USDA’s Black History Month Committee and Federal Women’s Excellence Committee, and the Agriculture Secretary's award for media relations. He has published a non-fiction book, The Naked Intruder, on the scientific discovery of the first known viroid.