Stephen O'Connor

Stephen O’Connor is the author of Rescue, short fiction and poetry; Will My Name Be Shouted Out?, memoir and social analysis; Orphan Trains, The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed, narrative history; and Here Comes Another Lesson, a short story collection, forthcoming from Free Press.

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.

RESCUE

In "The Afterlife of Lytton Swain," one of several striking stories in this first collection by Stephen O'Connor, the Rev. Lytton Swain gradually adapts to a nether world where he can order a cup of coffee in a diner, casually pocket a severed finger found on the ground, and exchange pleasantries with Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell. The terrain is familiar, yet filled with discomfiting "inconsistencies," causing him "to suspect that it was not his mind, but reality itself that was wandering." A sense of wandering reality pervades most of these startlingly inventive stories...
--The New York Times Book Review

Stephen O'Connor is one of several promising young artists...who are using surrealism not to bypass our dulling consciousness in search of a deeper truth, but to avoid the limitations of traditional story-telling...
--The Los Angeles Times

This is a variety show of 14 very different stories by a new New York author who switches styles and voices with the ease of a quick-change artist...
--The Seattle Times

WILL MY NAME BE SHOUTED OUT?

How many issues are more important than the failure of our schools to produce new generations of Americans who can perform the basic tasks of postindustrial society? Alarms need to be sounded regularly, and Mr. O'Connor performs that service in a clear, straightforward voice... To Mr. O'Connor, the crisis in American education is not "a simple matter of inadequate standards and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy." Ask any teacher to name the No. 1 problem, he says, and it would be the "relentless intrusion into the classroom of the social problems that the students suffer both out on the streets and in their own homes."...
--The New York Times Book Review

In this thoughtful and ambitious account... teacher Stephen O'Connor details his efforts to do in New York City what every conscientious English teacher hopes to do: "make writing matter in the real world, generate student writing that has political and social importance, writing that makes the world we live in a wiser, kinder, and better place."... [E]ven though the plays that came from O'Connor's classes were triumphantly crafted and staged, one can't come away from reading his book without feeling that we are barely holding on in our urban schools, and that inner-city schools in particular are barely surviving the most traumatic social, political, racial and financial pressures placed on them in this century. It's also painfully obvious that there are not enough teacher-heroes of O'Connor stature to prop up the system much longer."
--The Minneapolis Star Tribune

ORPHAN TRAINS: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed

For some 80 years the orphan trains described in Stephen O'Connor's book took stray and destitute children from New York's grim slums to the countryside, where they were chose by farmers, artisans and merchants fro employment or adoption. The scenes Mr. O'Connor evokes seem strange by today's standards: hundreds of newly transported children, most of them boys, being picked by strangers for what was intended to be redemptive labor, a new life-saving chance. And yet, as Mr. O'Connor points out in "Orphan Trains," his insightful and fascinating piece of social history, that practice, which lasted until about 1930, was the immediate predecessor of today's foster care system...
--The New York Times (daily)

...O'Connor's immensely readable book vividly portrays Brace and the world in which he operated. "Orphan Trains" not only offers us a trip to the past but provides historical context crucial to understanding and evaluating present-day attitudes and policies about poverty, families and children.
--The Los Angeles Times

...The most charismatic of these [19th century social reformers and] thinkers was Charles Loring Brace, enthrallingly portrayed in Mr. O'Connor's "Orphan Trains"..."
--The Wall Street Journal