Stephen O'Connor

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Stephen O'Connor

Stephen O’Connor (born May 21, 1952) is an American writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His most recent novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings has been published by Viking. His short fiction has appeared in many places, including The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, and New England Review. His essays have appeared The New York Times, Agni, and many other places. His poems have been in Poetry, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Missouri Review and elsewhere.

Early life

O’Connor was born May 21, 1952 in Brooklyn, New York to an Irish father and a French mother. He grew up mainly in New Jersey, and attended Columbia University, where he studied with Kenneth Koch and U.C. Berkeley, where he studied with Leonard Michaels.

He published his first short story, “On the Wing,” in Partisan Review in 1981. His first book was Rescue (Harmony, 1989), a collection of short stories, some realistic, some surrealistic, and a long narrative poem about John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the Grand Canyon.

Literary and teaching career

From 1988 until 1996, he directed a school-wide Teachers & Writers Collaborative program at a combined elementary and middle school in New York City, which became the subject of his second book, Will My Name Be Shouted Out? (Simon & Schuster, 1996). While this book is nominally a memoir, it primarily concerns a group of students whom O’Connor helped to write and perform plays about actual incidents of violence in New York City, and whose lives exemplify the ways that talented and hard-working Black and Latino children are ill served by schools, social policy and many other aspects of American culture

O’Connor returned to the topics of poor children and social policy in his next book, Orphan Trains; The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), a nonfiction account of a controversial nineteenth and early twentieth century effort, under which vagrant and/or orphaned children in New York City were sent, generally by train to the country where they would be taken in and sometimes exploited by local families.

Like Rescue, Here Comes Another Lesson (Free Press, 2010), O’Connor’s second collection of short fiction, contains a wide variety of surreal and realistic stories, one about a minotaur and a computer-game playing “new girl,” another about a traumatized soldier just back from Iraq, and a series of stories about a professor of Atheism.

Albert Mobilio described O’Connor’s novel, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (Viking, 2016) in Bomb Magazine as a “historical-fantastical novel… dense with observation, and precisely aimed at the interior life of the titular characters. Each [chapter] reads like a prose poem—elegantly shaped, brimming with indelible images—bearing plentiful revelations about race, colonial life, power, and sexuality. Insights are rendered with abundant craft and arrive—via the author’s counter-intuitive deployment of the present tense—with bracing immediacy. This is speculative history designed to implicate the reader, as we are never far from the here and now: ‘It turns out that Thomas Jefferson is neither dirigible nor cloud nor breeze, but a bronze monument hundreds of feet high, and all of us are trapped inside him, though some of us claim to have come here voluntarily.’”

Published work

Books

Here Comes Another Lesson, Free Press

Orphan Trains; The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed, Houghton Mifflin/U. Chicago

Will My Name Be Shouted Out?, Simon & Schuster/Touchstone

Rescue, New York, Harmony Books

Fiction

"Love," Electric Literature

“Sawed-in-Half Girl,” Antioch Review

“Ziggurat,” The New Yorker

“Disappearance and,” Conjunctions

“White Fire,” TriQuarterly

“I Think I’m Happier,” Threepenny Review

“Trouble,” New England Review

“Man in the Moon,” Conjunctions

“He Will Not See Me Stopping Here,” Denver Quarterly

“Bestiary,” New England Review

"The Afterlife of Lytton Swain," The Massachusetts Review

"What Makes You Think You Deserve This?" The Quarterly

"Help," The Quarterly

"Rescue," The Quarterly

"Unknowing," Fiction International

"Bell's Door," ISBN 0-943568-01-3

"On the Wing," Partisan Review

Poetry

“Natural Selection,” Knockout

“What Next?” “Sweet Nothing,” Green Mountains Review

“Cottage,” AGNI/Online

“Biology,” Poetry

“Uz,” “Song of Songs,” “Promises,” “Idolatry,” “Eternal Return,” “Dust and Ashes.” Missouri Review

“Atheism,” “Too Late to Say,” Knockout

"Temporary Moments," Journal of Temporary Culture

"William Dunn," Hubbub (poem

Nonfiction

“Against Assessment,” Beck, Heather, ed. Teaching Creative Writing in Higher Education

“Charles Loring Brace,” Shweder, Richard A., ed. The Chicago Companion to the Child

“Milosz’s Choice; An Investigation of Sentimentality,” AGNI

"When Children Relied on Faith-Based Agencies," New York Times

"No Place Like Home," Chicago Tribune Magazine

"The Orphan Trains of Charles Loring Brace," Doubletake

"Words and the World at P.S. 313," Teachers & Writers Newsletter

“On the Outside Looking In by Cristina Rathbone,” New York Times Book Review

"Playwriting to Compassion," Education Week

"Problems Schools Can't Solve," New York Times

"That's the Way Life Really Is; Violence in the Classroom," Culturefront

"Death in the Everyday Schoolroom," The Nation

External links

• Stephen O’Connor’s Official Website
• Stephen O’Connor’s Facebook Author Page