Stephen O'Connor

Stephen O’Connor is the author of the short story collections, Here Comes Another Lesson (forthcoming from Free Press) and Rescue. His nonfiction books include: Will My Name Be Shouted Out?, a memoir and Orphan Trains, The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed, narrative history.

His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Partisan Review, The New England Review, TriQuarterly, and many other places. His poetry has been in Poetry Magazine, The Missouri Review, Agni, Knockout, and Green Mountains Review. His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, Doubletake, Agni, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and elsewhere.

He is the recipient of the Cornell Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing from Columbia University, the Visiting Fellowship for Historical Research by Artists and Writers from the American Antiquarian Society, and the DeWitt Wallace/​Reader's Digest Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. Will My Name Be Shouted Out? was named 1996 "Book of the Year" by Kappa Delta Pi, an education honor society. Orphan Trains was designated 2001 best book on “the roots of juvenile crime” by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

He teaches in the writing MFA programs of Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence. For eight years he directed and taught in Teachers & Writers Collaborative’s flagship creative writing program at a public school in New York City. He has received a B.A. from Columbia University, and an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, both in English literature.

Stephen O’Connor was born to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York in 1952. His father came to the United States from Ireland at the age of six, and his mother from France when she was twenty. O’Connor was raised primarily in New Jersey, and, from 1970 to 1974, attended Columbia University, where he studied with Kenneth Koch. For several months after his graduation, he hitchhiked around the United States, and settled for a year in Atlanta, Georgia. At the end of 1975 he returned to New York City, where he worked as a recreation therapist and poetry teacher at a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children, and as a desk assistant at ABC News. In the fall of 1977 he moved to Berkeley California to attend graduate school in English literature, and met his wife, the novelist and nonfiction writer, Helen Benedict in a fiction writing class taught by Leonard Michaels. O’Connor received his MA in December of 1978, at which point he realized he was not temperamentally suited to being a scholar, and decided to devote his energies to becoming a writer.

He supported himself by working part time as a pick-up and delivery truck driver and by teaching creative writing through Vista College in Oakland. Under the auspices of Vista College, he developed a creative writing class, taught at an Easter Seals Center, for people suffering from aphasia, blindness, paralysis, amnesia and other disabilities that made the act of writing difficult or impossible. In January of 1981, O’Connor and Benedict moved to New York City, where they each pursued careers as freelance journalists. O’Connor worked primarily as a reporter and fact checker at Money and Esquire magazines, and did some ghost writing and freelance journalism. He published his first short story in Partisan Review in the Spring of 1981, and had another story in Fiction International not long after.

His and Helen Benedict’s first child, Simon Benedict O’Connor, was born in 1983. O'Connor continued to publish short stories throughout the 1980s, with several appearing in The Quarterly, a magazine edited by Gordon Lish. O’Connor’s first book, RESCUE, a collection of stories (including one long narrative poem), was published by Harmony Books in 1989.

As soon as O’Connor received a publishing contract for RESCUE, he left journalism and began to teach creative writing in the New York public schools with Teachers & Writers Collaborative. In the fall of 1988, after having done residencies at a variety of schools in and around New York City, O’Connor was made the director of T&W’s longest running and most extensive residency, one that had previously been directed by Phillip Lopate and Alan Ziegler. As the director of this residency, at a combined elementary and middle school, O’Connor taught every grade from Kindergarten through eighth, as well as trained and managed a staff of teachers hired primarily from the creative writing MFA program at Columbia. O’Connor’s daughter, Emma Benedict O’Connor, was born in 1991.

WILL MY NAME BE SHOUTED OUT?, O’Connor’s second book (hardback, Simon & Schuster, 1996; paperback, Touchstone, 1997), is a nonfiction account of a group of talented but troubled students whom O’Connor helped to write and then perform plays about actual incidents of violence in New York City. While the book aims primarily to tell these students’ moving stories, it is also an exploration of the significance of writing—and of art generally—to young people who don’t have time for anything that won’t help them save their lives. At the same time the book argues that what is commonly called “the crisis in the schools” is to a very large extent a crisis in the community, and that urban schools, in particular, won’t improve significantly unless something is done to mitigate the ravages of violence, drug addiction and endemic poverty in the communities that surround them.

O’Connor’s third book, ORPHAN TRAINS; The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (hardback, Houghton Mifflin 2001; paperback, University of Chicago Press, 2004) is a narrative history of the origins of child welfare and foster care in the United States. In particular, it tells the story of Charles Loring Brace’s extremely influential efforts to help poor children by giving them an education and by finding them homes and jobs. The most famous—and, ultimately, infamous—of Brace's projects is the so called “Orphan Trains,” which took poor city children to the country, where they were taken in primarily by farm families. Between 1854 and 1930 an estimated quarter of a million American children were found homes by the Orphan Train programs of Brace and his many imitators. By 1930 all of those programs, including Brace’s own Children’s Aid Society, had evolved into foster care and adoption agencies.

O'Connor's fourth book, HERE COMES ANOTHER LESSON, a collection of short fiction, will be published by Free Press in August 2010.

After teaching fiction and nonfiction writing at such places as Rutgers, the New School, and Lehman College (CUNY) for several years, O’Connor moved with his family to Paris for a year, where he taught at the American University. Since the fall of 2002 he has been teaching in the MFA programs of Columbia and Sarah Lawrence. In recent years he has published fiction in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, Threepenny Review, New England Review, Conjunctions and other journals. His poetry has been in Poetry Magazine, Missouri Review, Agni, Green Mountains Review and elsewhere. His most recent nonfiction has appeared in Agni, The New York Times, DoubleTake, New Labor Forum, The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune. He lives with his wife and daughter in New York City. His son, Simon O’Connor, is the co-founder, co-songwriter and lead guitarist of the rock band Amazing Baby.