What It Might Feel Like to Hope: Short Fiction

Dorene O’Brien is a Detroit-based creative writing teacher and writer. Her stories have won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the Nelson Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, and the international Bridport Prize. She has won fellowships from the NEA and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in the Baltimore Review, Madison Review, Chicago Tribune, Montreal Review, and others. Voices of the Lost and Found, her first fiction collection won the USA Best Book Award for Short Fiction. 

Her second full-length collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, released in 2019 by Baobob Press was named first runner-up in the Mary Roberts Rinehart Fiction Prize and won a gold medal in the 2019 Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY).

The stories take place in Detroit and small towns in the upper Midwest, and they’ve been described as “gritty.” They feature characters ranging from a man barely surviving eight compulsory blind dates with daughters of his mother’s friends, to a tarot card reader who schemes to save Detroit from blight and casinos, to a research scientist whose Alzheimer’s diagnosis leads him to find new meaning in the crystals he can no longer study.

https://baobabpress.com/books/what-it-might-feel-like-to-hope/
https://www.doreneobrien.com/