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Keith O’Brien is a former reporter for The Boston Globe and a freelance writer.

His work has appeared recently in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Boston Magazine, Runner's World, The Scientist, Cincinnati Magazine, the Dallas Morning News, and Oxford American, the Southern magazine of good writing. And he also contributes stories to several National Public Radio shows, including Here & Now, Weekend America and Only a Game.

Keith often tells his wife that he is not a word guy, but evidence suggests otherwise. In 2009, Keith won the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for a Boston Globe story that he and a colleague wrote about the deaths of two girls in a South Boston arson. Keith has written about the big. His coverage of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita kept him in New Orleans off an on for a year. And he also loves to write about the small, like his award-winning story about a homeless man whose death went almost unnoticed.

Keith graduated from Northwestern University in 1995 with a degree in history. He taught English in Japan and later, upon returning to the US, landed his first journalism job as a high school sports reporter near Chicago. In 1998, he moved to Oregon, where he covered the state legislature for the Statesman Journal in Salem. In 2000, Keith moved to New Orleans where he worked for several years at the Times-Picayune, chronicling everything from hog-dog rodeos (yes, you read correctly) to the bizarre life and death of a French Quarter clown. In all, he spent four years as either a correspondent or a staff writer for the Boston Globe.

He and his wife now live in the Midwest with their two sons, a large cat and a small dog. Keith is currently at work on a book about Kentucky high school basketball and is teaching journalism at Miami University.

He is 37.