Jessica O’Brien is a writer and visual artist. She received a BA in Philosophy from UCSB and an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. Jess writes poems, essays, and stories. She paints and sculpts faces.

I’ve self-published five chapbooks: murmurs (2017), Pines (2018), Liberties (2018), GUM DROP (2021), and Casual Takes (2022). My writing has also been published by Prolific Press in the literary magazine 50 Haikus, and has been featured in the anthology Starting Lines as well as Southbay Magazine. With gratitude, I’ve received numerous writing scholarships including the Experiencing Shakespeare Writing Scholarship (2020), the Write MFA Scholarship (2021), and, twice, the California College of the Arts Leslie Scalapino Scholarship (2021 & 2022).

Back to the third person––it’s getting a bit stuffy in here. Jessica’s visual portraits have been recognized for their empathic portrayals of grief and grace. Her oil painting, A Self-Portrait of Childhood, was awarded 1st place in the Give Day Contest conducted by the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Division of Humanities and Fine Arts (2018), and Nymph, a portrait painted on tree bark, received 1st place in the Manhattan Beach Fair (2019). Jess has also received a Faculty Award of Distinction for her Pelt Cloak, a hand-sewn textile piece made from the ‘furs’ of synthetic stuffed animals, which was displayed in the AD&A museum from June 8th to June 16th, 2019.