About the Author
The author of six books, Elaine Neil Orr was born and grew up among the forests and rivers of Southwestern Nigeria. Her explorations of home and exile and spiritual connection are rooted in those rich formative years. She comes to the American South by way of that other South in West Africa. After devoting herself to literary scholarship in the early part of her career, Elaine could no longer resist the call of creative writing. She first published a memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, followed by two novels, A Different Sun and Swimming Between Worlds, finalist for the 2019 Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award in fiction. Dancing Woman is her third novel.
Elaine has received numerous prizes and awards, including most recently the 2023 John Ehle Prize, North Carolina Literary Review, and the 2021 Denny C. Plattner Award in Creative Writing, Appalachian Review. She has won grants from the NEH, the North Carolina Arts Council, and North Carolina Humanities. Elaine received her Ph.D. from Emory University and is Professor of English at North Carolina State University. She also serves on the faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, Andy, and their beloved pup, Sam.
Elaine believes in “writing under the influence,” by which she means reading the most brilliant writers she can find as she writes and especially as she revises, regardless of subject matter. Some of her favorites are Michael Ondaatje, Virginia Woolf, William Maxwell, Toni Morrison, Jose Saramago, Ben Okri, Maggie O’Farrell, Charles Frazier, Lily King, Ernest Gaines, and Jenny Erpenbeck.