About Maureen

Maureen O’Leary (Maureen Ellen O’Leary) is a writer in northern California. Her essays, some award-winning, have appeared in numerous local, national, and international publications, including Financial Times, Hemispheres Magazine, The East Bay Monthly, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chronicle Review. Her poems have been published in California Quarterly, Watershed Review, Months to Years, and in two anthologies: A Walk with Nature: Poetic Encounters that Nourish the Soul and Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets.

In addition to her published work, Maureen has completed a mystery, The Promised End, and a memoir, A Sow’s Ear, a Silk Purse, a unified collection of essays focusing on her childhood. She is also working with an illustrator on her children’s book series Pip and Petite, starring her cats (no longer with us, alas!). A lively history of her adolescent/teen babysitting experiences with the working title Babysitting: Tales of Horror (Sort-of) is in progress.

Although she enjoys writing in all genres, Maureen finds her greatest pleasure in writing creative non-fiction (many pieces available upon request…). By exploring and recounting in lively prose her memories and her reflections on all things that give texture to her world, she hopes to encourage her readers to do the same. Using writing to revisit in imagination our past and to investigate our present inevitably enriches our lives.

An east coast (Boston) transplant, Maureen earned her Ph.D. in English at Berkeley and was a tenured professor for many years at a community college. There she encountered wonderful students of all ages, 18 to 80, who taught her undoubtedly far more than she taught them. Maureen lives in Oakland with her husband. She can be contacted at maur.oleary@gmail.com.