Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Experience in Groups (2018), People on Sunday (2013), Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002). His work is part of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O’Brien (2012), and he collaborated with poet Jeff Clark on 2A (2006).
 
O’Brien explores the structural possibilities of public space and speech, investigating the threshold between observer and observed. In an interview with Danniel Schoonebeek for The American Reader, O’Brien stated, “I think of poetry as something other than entertainment because it makes conceptual and nonconceptual demands, makes its consumer a maker, and promises that speech between strangers isn’t over or fixed.”
 
O’Brien teaches at the University of California-Berkeley and for San Quentin State Prison’s Prison University Project. He lives in California.