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Keith O'Brien is a staff writer at the Boston Globe and a regular contributor to other publications, including the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and several National Public Radio shows.

His work has appeared on NPR's Weekend America, Only a Game, and Here and Now. And his stories over the years have taken him to unforgettable places including Slovenia's highest mountain peak and Ground Zero in New York. He once rode 2,500 miles in a motorhome with drunken Patriots fans bound for the Super Bowl and, in 2005, he covered the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

He had chased storms before.

For more than five years before coming to Boston, Keith was a staff writer at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, where, among other things, he covered crime and courts, writing narratives about real people from the back roads of Evangeline Parish to the back alleys of the French Quarter.

Along the way, Keith has written about music and sports, medicine and culture. In 2002, he followed CBS news anchor Dan Rather as he chased the eye of a hurricane. In 2003, he chronicled the rise and fall of a French Quarter clown who overdosed in his Boston apartment. And in 2004, he wrote about gay marriages on Cape Cod, serial killer trials in Baton Rouge, and dog fighting in dusty pens in rural Louisiana. His stories have won numerous awards for both deadline news and feature writing.

Keith was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest of three children. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1995 and taught English in Japan, before returning to the US to begin his journalism career as a high school sports reporter in Kankakee, Ill.

He now lives in Boston with his wife, a small dog, a cat, and a young son.

He is 35.