Author Bio

obrien bioDorene O'Brien was born and raised in Detroit where she can still be seen taking photos of the UA Theater Building on Bagley or dining at Lafayette after researching her latest story. She has been a fiction writer for twenty years, and currently teaches creative writing at the College for Creative Studies and at Wayne State University, where she earned her MA in English. She has studied with acclaimed short story writers Peter Ho Davies and Antonya Nelson. O'Brien won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction in 2000, was the 2002 winner of New Millennium's Fiction Award and in 2003 won the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award. She won the prestigious Bridport Prize the following year and is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her short stories have appeared in the Connecticut Review, Clackamas Literary Review, the Chicago Tribune, New Millennium Writings, Carve Magazine, Ellipsis, Cimarron Review, Red Rock Review, Inkwell and others. She is currently working on a novel featuring fossil hunters in Ethiopia and a short story collection that explores the relationship between time, place and memory.