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Photo: Nina Subin

Editor-in-Chief, Library of America, New York

Bosch Fellow in Public Policy - Class of Fall 2011


Geoffrey O’Brien is a poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and a cultural historian. He has been a contributor to Artforum, Film Comment, New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Village Voice, New Republic, Bookforum, and the New York Review of Books. O’Brien has also has contributed essays and liner notes for The Criterion Collection and been included in numerous anthologies, served as editor of The Reader’s Catalog (1987–1991), and has published works in cultural criticism, poetry, and history. Among his most publications are The Fall of the House of Walworth: Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America (Henry Holt, 2010), Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears (Counterpoint, 2005), The Browser’s Ecstasy (Counterpoint, 2003), Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties (Counterpoint, 2002), The Times Square Story (W.W. Norton, 1998), Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks And The Masters Of Noir (Da Capo Press, 1997), and The Phantom Empire (W. W. Norton, 1995). O’Brien was faculty member of the writing program at The New School, and was a member of the Selection Committee for The New York Film Festival in 2003. In 1992, he joined the staff of the Library of America as an executive editor and became editor-in-chief in 1998.

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