Author Archive: Elaine Neil Orr
Elaine Neil Orr is a trans-Atlantic writer of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Themes of home, country, and spiritual longing run through her writing. A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa, her newest book (Berkley/Penguin, 2013), has been called by Lee Smith “as lyrical and passionate a novel as has ever been written. [It] shines in the mind like a rare gem.” Philip Deaver describes it as “[a] beautiful novel, exquisitely written, perfectly complex, true to the past, relevant today, unforgettable.”
Her memoir, Gods of Noonday (Virginia, 2003), was a Top-20 Book Sense selection and a nominee for the Old North State Award as well as a SIBA Book Award. She is associate editor of a collection of essays on international childhoods, Writing Out of Limbo, and the author of two scholarly books.
Orr has published extensively in literary magazines including The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Shenandoah, and Image Journal. Her short stories and short memoirs have won several Pushcart Prize nominations and competition prizes. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
She was born in Nigeria to medical missionary parents and spent her growing-up years in the savannahs and rain forests of that country. Her family remained in Nigeria during its civil war. Orr left West Africa at age sixteen and attended college in Kentucky. She studied creative writing and literature at the University of Louisville before taking her Ph.D. in Literature and Theology at Emory University. She is an award-winning Professor of English at North Carolina State University and serves on the faculty of the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University. She reads and lectures widely at universities and conferences from Atlanta to Austin to San Francisco to Vancouver to New York to Washington D.C., and in Nigeria.
Orr lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, Anderson Orr.
Living and Writing and Faith: Dispatch from Self-Isolation, Day 30
All I want to do is have coffee with my parents under a shade tree. It’s day 30 of self-isolating in the era of Covid-19. I’m sixty-five and immunosuppressed (a double-organ transplant patient) so I started drawing back during my spring break from N.C. State. The first week, I went out for groceries and once […]
Taking Back the House By Elaine Neil Orr
The year I attended first grade, I lived with my family in a two-story house (the style is called a foursquare) in the West End neighborhood of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The house already seemed a bit run down. It had probably been a rental for some years. Among my most vivid memories is a small […]
Learning to Fall
Between summer and winter, we are in fall, a season I have found particularly advantageous for writing. The earth tilts away from the sun, our light source. Yet though the days grow shorter, the light appears longer across the ground. With this particular slant of light we begin to turn inward like plants do. We […]
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