Judith Berman (born 1958) is an American anthropologist and writer of science fiction and fantasy. and She grew up in Moscow, Idaho, and throughout her childhood consumed Golden Age science fiction. Berman began writing and making up her own stories around the age of five or six. She attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she majored in Anthropology, Russian, and comparative literature and graduated in 1979. By training, she is a linguistic anthropologist and has published articles on Native American myth and translations, in particular those of the Pacific Northwest. After working as an editorial assistant at W.W. Norton, she began her graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania where she obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology (1991). She also worked as a research associate at the