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David Brendan O’Meara is a writer, actor and translator from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who has also been known to occasionally produce and direct spoken word performances, as well as write digital code.

In 2023, Dave translated two books from Spanish to English. The first was Noche de Perros Tristes, by Julio Grotten, which became Night of the Sad Dogs: Whispers, Scrawls, Curses and Wails from Puente Grande Prison.  (Julio Grotten was released from Puente Grande Prison in 2022 after 16 years of incarceration, and established Gorgona Cartonera (cardboard publishing imprint), in cooperation with La Rueda Cartonera and Viento Cartonera, two leaders of the cardboard publishing movement in Jalisco. Dave also did the translation for a long poem by Rubén Medina, one of the founders of the infrarrealista movement in Mexican poetry.  This was published in Aquel quetzalcóatl se fue pa’l norte (That Quetzacóatl Went Up North), in an bilingual edition published by Manofalsa Editores, Lima Peru.

In 2022, Dave released Teratología/Teratology, a bilingual edition of his theatrical monologue in verse, published by Manofalsa Editores, of Lima Peru. Dave presented the book in Peru in Cusco, Urcos, and Arequipa, and in Mexico in Guadalajara, Huasco de Ocampo, Pachuca, and Mexico City (Complejo Cultural Los Pinos). Dave also delivered a full theatrical performance of Teratología, in Spanish, at the Centro Cultural Calzada, in Guadalajara.

Other recent projects include My Way to Canossa, a novel (OT!OM!, 2018, 2nd edition, 2023; audio serialization expected 2024); Three Plays for One Actor, a collection of verse monologues (OT!OM! September 2017), and The Death of the Homunculus, a remix of his experimental podcast, Five by Five. His website, daveomeara.com, also features Crystal Cabinets, a collection of his critical writings in English and Spanish.

As an audio producer, Dave has released Destination: Downtown, a comic walking tour of Milwaukee featuring Art Kumbalek, and Sermon of the Mouth, a collection of Dan Hanrahan’s energetic performance poetry from the earl 1990s.  He also produced, co-directed (with K O’Brien and Dave Maleckar) and played half of the narrator in Sweeny in the Trees, a 18-hour complete staged reading for the 50th anniversary of Flann O’Brien’s post-Joycean comic novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds.

As a solo actor, Dave has performed the three monologues in Three Plays for One Actor (Parsimony, Group Theory, and Teratology) in various venues. Dave has also toured the Midwest (mainly bars and Irish festivals) with Moon & Cloud, a pair of “plays for one actor” which he adapted and performed from short stories by James Joyce and Joseph Gahagan.

 From 1999 to 2002, he was Artistic Director of Hotel Milwaukee, a weekly one-hour comedy-variety radio show on the Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio. Under Dave’s direction, the show won a Golden Reel Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and was selected to be aired nationally on the A&E Channel of Sirius Satellite Radio. In the first decade of the 21st Century, Dave created a number of experimental digital and web-based works, including  Kunst Mundo Discours 2008, a response to 2008 Whitney Biennial and its catalog (both the print and web versions) that took advantage of the brief period when the Google Translation API was available for free. Dave also developed two mini-sites presenting the work of G DuMonthier: State Birds and Flowers: An American Landscape, and Jack & Jackie Orbit the Moon. Other projects from OT!OM! Labs include Critical Templates, a resource for developers of Artificial Criticism, Bite Size, an online engine for the creation of aleatory poetry, and Come In We’re Sorry, a summer project by student interns of the Digital Defrabrication Unit, a joint venture of OT!OM! Labs and GEE Enterprises.  Unfortunately, most of these projects were rendered inaccessible by the deprecation of PHP 5 in the following decade.

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