Gregory Orr

Gregory Orr is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including the forthcomng River Inside the River (Norton, 2013); a widely-read study of lyric poetry and personal survival, Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press); and a memoir, The Blessing. His essay on revisiting the rural jail where he was imprisoned in the sumer of 1965, when he worked as a volunteer in the Civil Rights Movement, "Return to Haynesville," was republished in all three annual anthologies of best non-fiction of 2009 (Best Essays of 2009, Best Creative Non-fiction of 2009, and Pushcart Prize). The recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, he has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975, where he was founder and first director of its M.F.A. Program in Writing. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, in Charlottesville.