Daniel Berrigan

Born in Virginia, Minnesota, poet, Jesuit priest, and peace activist Daniel Berrigan earned a BA at the St. Andrew-on-Hudson and an MA at Woodstock College. With his brother Philip, also a priest, Father Berrigan publicly protested U.S. policy in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. He was one of the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists who were arrested and charged with destroying draft records in Catonsville, Maryland. They were found guilty at their 1968 trial and sentenced to prison. He also helped found the antinuclear Plowshares Movement.
 
Berrigan’s free verse poetry expresses his Catholic faith and peace activism with clarity and explicit, unflinching imagery. Berrigan wrote numerous volumes of poetry, including Time Without Number (1957), which won the Lamont Poetry Prize; Prison Poems (1973); Tulips in the Prison Yard: Selected Poems of Daniel Berrigan (1992); and And the Risen Bread: Selected and New Poems 1957–1997 (1998).
 
Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings (2009) supplies an introduction to Berrigan’s work. His prose includes Night Flight to Hanoi: War Diary With 11 Poems (1968), Testimony: The Word Made Fresh (2004), and No Gods but One (2009). Berrigan also wrote the play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), which he later shaped into a screenplay. His life is recounted in his autobiography, To Dwell in Peace (1987), and in Murray Polner and Jim O’Grady’s biography Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan (1997). He lived in New York until his death in 2016.