Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Geoffrey Gordon O'Brien is an American poet. Educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa, O'Brien has taught at Brooklyn College, The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been the Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary's College of California and the Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently teaches. He also teaches in the Prison University Project at San Quentin.
On November 9, 2011, O'Brien suffered a rib injury in an altercation with police, while attending a peaceful protest.
O'Brien's poem "Fidelio" was published in the March 19, 2018 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

Works online

at No: a journal of the arts.

Criticism

on "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot.
an essay which explores the work of poet Michael Palmer
a talk on Whitman and Ashbery

Works

The Guns and Flags Project 2A Green and Gray Hesiod Poem with No Good Lines Metropole People on Sunday Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O'Brien

''Experience in Groups''

Political protest

On November 9, 2011, O'Brien took part in Occupy Cal, a demonstration on the Berkeley campus in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. According to reports O'Brien spoke out to a police officer who was hitting a Berkeley student because he would not break his link in a human chain. The police officer hit O'Brien in the ribs, a reaction he would later call "brutal."