Jessica O’Brien is a writer, editor, 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.

Jess has self-published five chapbooks: murmurs (2017), Pines (2018), Liberties (2018), GUM DROP (2021), and Casual Takes (2022). Her writing was published in the anthology Starting Lines, Southbay Magazine, and Prolific Press’s literary magazine 50 Haikus. She’s 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).

Jessica’s visual portraits have been recognized for their empathic portrayals of grief and grace. Her work was most recently displayed in a San Francisco Gallery as part of the show LETS DON’T WAIT (2025). 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 eucalyptus bark, received 1st place in the Manhattan Beach Fair (2019). Jess has also received a Faculty Award of Distinction for Pelt Cloak, a hand-sewn textile piece crafted from the ‘furs’ of synthetic stuffed animals, which was displayed in the AD&A museum from June 8th to June 16th, 2019.