Ithaca College

National Coming Out Day will be celebrated at Ithaca College with a performance by local poet and entrepreneur Michelle Courtney Berry. Her presentation on Thursday, October 8, is sponsored by the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Education, Outreach, and Services. Scheduled for 7:30 p.m. in Textor 101, it is free and open to the public.

From 2004 to 2006 Berry served as Tompkins County’s second poet laureate. A frequent collaborator with local and nationally renowned musicians and performers, she has appeared on “Good Morning America” and provided opening poetry and singing for appearances by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Maya Angelou.

Berry served as a representative to the LGBT and rural upstate New York delegations for Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC). She was also elected as one of 30 vice-chairs at the DNC by the New York delegation. She has been a member of the Ithaca City Council and served as alternate acting mayor. Since 1992 she has been the owner of Courtney Consulting, a strategic communications and marketing firm, and has delivered hundreds of presentations to businesses and organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, the Gannett Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, PBS and United Way of America.

Berry has had her poems published in the “Oxford American,” “Paterson Literary Review,” “Nocturnes” and “Horticulture” as well as in several anthologies. The author of two feminist plays — “Labor” and “Song for Root and River” — she also has published a chapbook of poetry titled “The Month of Not Speaking.” She has served as a Cave Canem Fellow, Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation Scholar and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference participant.

In 2008 Berry was included among Central New York’s 20 Outstanding Women You Should Know by Cayuga Radio Group. She has also been the recipient of a Woman of Excellence Award in Community Service from the National Association of University Women and a Woman of the Year Award from the Status of Women Council. She holds a master’s degree in communication from Cornell University and bachelor of arts degree in English and political science from Binghamton University. She has taught at Cornell and Binghamton as well as in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College.