O’Connor, Deirdre
Born: 1963, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Vocations: Poet, Professor
Geographic Connection to Pennsylvania: Winfield & Lewisburg, Union County; Pittsburgh, Allegheny County

Keywords: Before the Blue Hour; Bucknell University; Pennsylvania State University; Public Poetry Project

Abstract: Deirdre O’Connor, co-director of Bucknell University’s Writing Center, is a Pittsburgh native. Born in 1963, she lived in the South Hills as a child and attended Bucknell and Pennsylvania State Universities for her Bachelor and Master's degrees. She has won several awards and grants for her poetry, including the Cleveland State Poetry Prize for her collection Before the Blue Hour.

Biography:

Deirdre O’Connor, honored by the Public Poetry Project in 2004 for her poem Notes on the Unspoken, claims that her family is one of the largest inspirations for her work. The oldest of four, she was born in Pittsburgh and raised in the South Hills neighborhood of the city. Her grandparents, some natives of Ireland and some the children of Irish and German immigrants, have had a great impact on O’Connor’s expression of her Irish heritage. The poet has visited Ireland several times and has even spent two summers there. While attending Bucknell University to get her Bachelor’s degree, she studied at Trinity College in Dublin for a semester in her junior year. To complete her Master’s degree, she came to the Pennsylvania State University. After college, O’Connor went to Fukushima-ken, Japan, to teach English as a Mombusho English Fellow. Her time spent there is reflected in “Traveling at Night in Fukushima,” a poem that journeys from a train in Japan to O’Connor’s Pennsylvania home, drawing on the familiar to create parallels between two distant places.

O’Connor’s first book of poetry, Before the Blue Hour, was published in 2002 and contains “Traveling at Night in Fukushima.” Filled with explorations of silence and dwelling on transitional moments, it won the 2001 Cleveland State Poetry Prize for best full-length volume of original poetry. Its veiled subjects range from family memories to encounters with unnamed loves, each subject addressed at oblique angles that leave the reader with a sense of mystery and loss. In O’Connor’s most appealing pieces, the words wind down from ambiguity to a concise image, refining the hazy start into a defined moment. The troubling “Boggle” presents a perfect example:

I didn’t know how to act around you at first,
safe in the sunlit rec room, the bright formica
tabletops, plants and smoke. I was happy enough
to sit down and puzzle things out, to recognize
order in chaos and form small words...

I was trying to rise up out of our life and smile.
The cuts on your wrist were stitched and hidden
though I pictured them as little mouths
the doctors had washed out with soap,
toothless, tongueless, misconstructed,
and puckered shut like poker faces who lost —
like you, perhaps yourself again, or not,
a face scrunched up in childlike concentration
over Boggle, your left hand shielding
what your right hand wrote, your mute wrists
keeping their secrets.

At first vague, the poem constructs a scene then fills it with emotion, creating an image of the narrator sitting across from a loved one, playing Boggle in an institutional rec room. The moment is increasingly marked by grief and hope as the poet fleshes out the picture, whittling down to the core of the moment.

O’Connor cites other inspirations for her work outside her family; her volunteer work exercises a pervasive influence, “in ways that may or may not be visible.” Her experiences include supporting sexual assault survivors, leading writing groups at Allenwood Federal Penitentiary, and participating in the Bucknell Brigade to Nicaragua.

O’Connor has received many awards, such as a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Donn Goodwin Award for Irish-American poetry. Her work has been featured in several journals, including River City, Poetry, and Hayden's Ferry Review. She currently serves as co-director of the Bucknell University Writing Center and is also the Associate Director of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, a program she participated in herself. Living on a farm in Winfield, Pennsylvania, she is married to a fellow professor at Bucknell, clinical research psychologist Bill Flack. The couple has a 12-year-old son, Will, the poet's stepson.

Works:

• Before the Blue Hour. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2002.

Sources:

• “Associate Staff Members, Deirdre O’Connor.” Stadler Center for Poetry: Administrative Staff. 14 May 2006. <http://www.bucknell.edu/Academics/Resources/Stadler_Center/ Administrative_Staff.html>.
• Leo, Teresa. “Before the Blue Hour.” Introduction to a reading by Deirdre O’Connor at the Kelly Writers House. <http://writing.upenn.edu/~wh/doconnorintro.html>.
• O'Connor, Deirdre. “Fwd: Re: Literary Map of Pennsylvania.” E-mail to Alan Jalowitz. 12 June 2006.
• “Poetry Center Prizes: First Book Competition and Open Competition.” 8 Nov. 2005. 14 May 2006. <http://www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter/contest1.html>.

This biography was prepared by Shannon Macken.