Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of three novels—The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, Love And Shame And Love (winner of the California Book Award), and The Second Coming Of Mavala Shikongo (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award)—and three story collections— Esther Stories (winner of the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Writing and a finalist for the Pen/ Hemingway Award), Last Car Over The Sagamore Bridge (a finalist for the Northern California Book Award), and Maggie Brown & Others. His essay collection and memoir, Am I Alone Here?: Notes On Reading To Live And Living To Read was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He followed it up with another collection of essays, Still No Word From You? which was finalist for both the Vermont Book Award and PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Peter’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other publications. His Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. Peter has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.
Peter has edited three nonfiction books focusing on oral histories for the Voice of Witness Series: Underground America: Narratives Of Undocumented Lives, Hope Deferred: Narratives Of Zimbabwean Lives, and Lavil: Live, Love, And Death In Port-Au-Prince. Peter also wrote introductions for the re-issue of Mavis Gallant’s novels, A Fairly Good Time and Women In Their Beds.
In 2017-2018, Peter was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Namibia where he taught at the University of Namibia and started an informal writing group that would, among others, include writers and poets who would go on to found the Windhoek Writers Club which, in time, became the collective that would contribute to the very first issue of Doek! Literary Magazine.
Peter is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He also regularly teaches on the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
More from and about Peter Orner: “Author Q&A: Peter Orner” (Washington Independent Review Of Books) • “A Writer’s Insight” (The Southern Review) • “Birding With Lanioturdus”, “Four Stories”, “On The Floor, Beside The Bed”, “Shhhhhh, Arthur’s Studying”, “Two Stories: ‘Rain’ and ‘Hope And Dino’” (Conjunctions), “Giving Directions Based On Things That Aren’t There Anymore: An Interview With Peter Orner (New Writers Review) • “I Hope My Characters Are As Flawed As I Am” (PRISM International) • “Peter Orner On The Pressure Of Fiction’s Infinite Possibilities” (Literary Hub) • “Peter Orner On The Art Of Reading And Writing” (Dartmouth) • “The Best Kept Literary Secret No Longer” Chicago Tribune) • “Writing About What Haunts Us” (The New York Times) • “Writing The Story You’ve Sat On For Fifteen Years” (Electric Literature) • Listen to Peter Orner on Texas Public Radio’s The Lonely Voice.
