Gregory Orr to Headline Festival of Contemporary Writing
Award-winning poet and memoirist Gregory Orr is set to headline the Fall 2011 session of Spalding University’s Festival of Contemporary Writing, Kentucky’s largest and most prestigious spring-fall reading series. Orr’s presentation takes place at 6 p.m. Friday, November 18, in the Gallery on the 16th floor of the Brown Hotel, 335 W. Broadway. The event is free, ticketless, and open to the public.
Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry. His subject matter ranges from death, trauma, and responsibility—when he was 12, Orr accidentally shot and killed his brother while hunting—to earthly and transcendent love, the subject of his two most recent works, How Beautiful The Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). His other volumes of poetry include The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002) Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); City of Salt (finalist for the LA Times Poetry Prize); We Must Make a Kingdom of It; and The Red House.
Orr’s memoir The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), chronicling his troubled boyhood, was chosen by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of 2002. His personal essay This I Believe was broadcast on National Public Radio in 2006 and included in the anthology This I Believe (Holt 2007). His essay about working as a teenager for the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South was selected for The Best American Creative Nonfiction published in 2009. Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press 2002), an extended meditation on the dynamics and function of the personal lyric, was described by Adrienne Rich as “a wise and passionate book.”
Orr is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence. He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Festival of Contemporary Writing is part of the brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at Spalding University. Spalding’s brief-residency MFA Program is a four-semester program in creative writing, offering concentrations in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, playwriting, and screenwriting. Fall and Spring semesters begin in Louisville in November and May, respectively, while a summer semester with residency abroad begins in June or July and is designed to fit teachers’ schedules. For more information, see www.spalding.edu/mfa.
