Gregory Orr

Gregory Orr was born in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley. He is the author of more than 10 collections of poetry, including Selected Books of The Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write (W.W. Norton, 2019), River Inside the River: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2013), and The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002). His book City of Salt (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Orr’s poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages. 

In an essay for the American Poetry Review, poet and critic Hank Lazer observes, “From Burning the Empty Nests ([Harper & Row,] 1973) to the present, Orr gradually developed the ability to fuse his incredible skill at visual precision—the signature of his image-based work in his very first book—with an insistent musical quality, joining visual precision with a beauty of sound.”

Orr is the author of several volumes of essays, criticism, and nonfiction. In Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002), he explores poetry’s role in confronting and surviving pain and suffering. He surveys the work of Keats, Dickinson, Plath, and Roethke among others, and how these poets depended on their work to combat their psychological anguish, which he also explores in his own poetry. When Orr was 12, he accidentally killed his brother in a hunting accident, an event his family was never able to talk about. His mother died not long thereafter. In 1965, at the age of 18, Orr worked as a civil rights volunteer in Mississippi. During this time, he was kidnapped at gunpoint in rural Alabama and held for a week in solitary confinement. Orr’s early poetry was greatly influenced by these events. In the opening of his essay, “The Making of Poems,” which was broadcast on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Orr said, “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.” 

Orr has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He has also been a Fulbright Scholar and a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute on Violence and Culture. He received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Orr earned a BA from Antioch College and an MFA from Columbia University. He founded the MFA program at the University of Virginia in 1975 and was the poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review from 1978 to 2003. After 44 years in the University of Virginia’s English department, Orr retired in 2019. Orr and his wife divide their time between their home in Virginia and a house in the Adirondacks.