Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, the daughter of American missionaries. At four-year intervals, her family came to the U.S. on leave but otherwise she grew up on compounds in Nigerian towns, leaving the country at age sixteen.

Orr finished high school in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, majored in Art at Campbellsville University (Kentucky), took her M.A. in English from the University of Louisville, and received her Ph.D. in Literature and Theology from Emory University in 1985.

As an award-winning teacher and Professor of English at North Carolina State University, Orr teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes in American, world, and contemporary literature as well as women’s studies and creative non-fiction. She also teaches in the brief residency MFA in Writing program at Spalding University.

Orr’s essays and poems have appeared in Southern Cultures, The Missouri Review, Kalliope, The Louisville Review and Black Mountain Review. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Modern Language Quarterly, South Atlantic Review and Journal of Narrative Technique. She is the author of two other books:  Subject to Negotiation: Reading Feminist Criticism and American Women’s Fictions (University of Virginia Press, 1997) and Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision (University of Mississippi Press, 1987).

Orr has won fellowships and grants from the NEH, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the North Carolina Humanities Council.
 

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Last Updated:  05/18/07