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Cover of Ash: Catastrophe, Performance, & the Craft by Dan O'Brien, with the first part of the title in gray on a darker gray background, the subtitle on a shaded orange area below, and the author's name on the bottom on a black background, with ragged edges like torn paper between each
Books distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center
184 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 | © 2027

ISBN (pbk): 978-1-968209-16-2

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-968209-17-9

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Will publish May 2027

Ash: Catastrophe, Performance, & the Craft

Essays

Dan O’Brien

In this collection of essays, an acclaimed poet and playwright searches for meaning amid catastrophe.

The twenty candid essays in Ash: Catastrophe, Performance, & the Craft are the culmination of a ten-year project by acclaimed poet and playwright Dan O’Brien. Divided into three parts, this volume—portions of which originally appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, and The Times Literary Supplement—combines the deeply personal with the artistic and professional, coalescing around the experience of trauma (physical, mental, moral) and the challenges presented by catastrophe and its aftermath.

In the title essay, O’Brien links the smoke and debris of the Los Angeles wildfires to the toxic legacy of September 11, tracing the lasting repercussions of collective disaster. In “Dear Brother,” he revisits a sibling’s suicide attempt and the family silences that shaped both his life and his writing. Elsewhere, in reflections on documentary theater, political violence, and a long collaboration with Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter Paul Watson, he weighs the responsibility and the cost of bearing witness to suffering.

Running through the book, and indeed through O’Brien’s career as poet, playwright, essayist, and memoirist, is a search for meaning in the midst of calamity, whether it results from terrorism, from conflagration, from cancer, or from victimhood and abuse. Written over a decade marked by devastating illness, profound cultural upheaval, and hard-won hope, Ash is both an intimate record of survival and a searching meditation on the resilience and reinvention to be found in the creative act.

About the Author

Dan O’Brien is an award-winning playwright, poet, and nonfiction writer. He is the author of Survivor’s Notebook and Our Cancers, both also published by Acre Books. His nonfiction has appeared widely in publications including The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review,The New York Times, The Guardian, and The American Scholar. O’Brien is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and two PEN America Awards for playwriting. He has taught at Princeton University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and numerous other institutions. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter, Isobel.
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Photo Credit: Cambridge Jones