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Gregory Orr is the author of more than ten collections of poems, including, most recently, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write. He is also the author of several volumes of essays, criticism, and memoir, including Poetry as Survival and A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry. Orr is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for The Blessing. Orr was the founder and director of the MFA Program in Writing at the University of Virginia, and the longtime poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Praise for The Blessing Orr has dedicated his life and work to redeeming suffering through poetry as lyric biography. He feels this project has saved him from wandering in a wilderness, reassured by conversations with readers and with writers living and dead who have faced similar loss, pain, and transformative beauty. All his work is of a piece, poems, essays, and memoir: a song of experience, joining a chorus of meaning. -American Academy of Arts and Letters Orr balances lyric grace with careful restraint to produce a convincing memoir about facing down despair. . . . Orr manages to confer spiritual power upon his readers by finding meaning in what most of us could not bear to endure. -San Francisco Chronicle The Blessing is an extraordinary book, full of luminous details, beautifully clear writing, and short, gorgeous chapters. . . . While The Blessing tells the story of becoming a poet and recounts a childhood full of wonder, it is more insistently a tale of survival, of a painful blessing, wounding, and growing through trauma and tragedy. -American Poetry Review Orr has accomplished an incredible feat, managing to bring together his tragic and triumphant personal narrative with his belief in the importance and impact of the personal lyric poem. . . . A sophisticated and convincing case for the `transformative power' of lyric poetry, as evidenced in Orr's own life experiences. -Valparaiso Poetry Review For Orr, poetry was a thread to hold onto during his darkest hours. Once he had hold of that thread, Orr knew that he could find his way out of the labyrinth of his own consciousness. . . . This book offers eloquent testimony to the engaging power of art in a man's life. -Washington Post The inadvertent shooting death of his brother by poet Orr gives this memoir a god-awful specific gravity and spurs the author's search for ways to live on. . . . Writing has sustained him. . . . Here, the old and new meanings of `blessing'-to sprinkle with blood, to confer spiritual power-harrowingly collide. -Kirkus
