O'Brien graduated from the University of Wyoming with a BA in social sciences with an emphasis in history and archaeology. Her article Camp Dubois, Wyoming: A Legacy of Literature was published in the Annals of Wyoming: Wyoming History Journal in the fall of 2015. Living in Dubois, Wyoming, with her husband, Bill, she often looks up from her home at the mountains where the former Dubois POW camp was located and thinks about the challenges the camp residents faced at the very isolated timber camp.