MICHAEL O’BRIEN

Michael O’Brien was born in Granville, NY in 1939. He graduated from Fordham--including a year abroad in Paris--and then earned an MA from Columbia in 1963. He lived the rest of his life in New York City, punctuated by writing residencies in northern California, the south of France, and at the Heinrich Böll Foundation on Achill Island in the west of Ireland. He made his livelihood in New York as an editor and also taught for stints at Hunter College and Brooklyn College. A poet of close observation and subtle figures, O’Brien published a dozen books of verse, including Sills: Selected Poems 1960 - 1999, Avenue, To the River, and Sleeping and Waking. He died on November 10, 2016.