Considered by many to be the master of the short, personal lyric, Gregory Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry, and several volumes of prose, including Poetry as Survival. Widely anthologized, his poetry has been translated into at least 10 languages.
Critic Hank Lazer observes: “From Burning the Empty Nests 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.”
As a twelve-year-old boy, Orr accidentally killed his brother in a hunting incident, an event his family was never able to talk about. His mother died soon thereafter, and Orr found the transformative power of language through poetry. His later near-death experience as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement, in which he was jailed and severely beaten, contributed to the urgency with which his poems sought transformation.
Orr has been awarded fellowships 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 for the Study of Culture and Violence, and he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. City of Salt was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award for Poetry.
Orr received his B.A. from Antioch College and his 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.
Selected Works:
Poetry
Burning the Empty Nests (1973)
Gathering the Bones Together (1975)
The Red House (1980)
We Must Make a Kingdom of It (1986)
New and Selected Poems (1988)
City of Salt (1995)
Orpheus & Eurydice (2001)
The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002)
Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (2005)
How Beautiful the Beloved (2009)
River Inside the River (2013)
Criticism
Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World (1996)
Poetry as Survival (2002)
Memoir
The Blessing (2002)
