The Friends of Hackney Library organization is pleased to host award-winning author Elaine Neil Orr as the featured speaker at its Spring 2015 book signing, wine reception and dinner/lecture. The event will take place in Barton College’s Hardy Alumni Hall on Tuesday, April 7, 2015. A book signing and wine reception will take place from 6:00-6:45 pm, followed by the dinner and program at 7:00 pm. Copies of the author’s books will be available for purchase at the book signing and following the program.

Elaine Neil Orr is a trans-Atlantic writer of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Themes of home, country, and spiritual longing run through her writing. A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa, her latest book (Berkley/Penguin, 2013), has been called by Lee Smith “as lyrical and passionate a novel as has ever been written. [It] shines in the mind like a rare gem.” Philip Deaver describes it as“[a] beautiful novel, exquisitely written, perfectly complex, true to the past, relevant today, unforgettable.”

Her memoir, Gods of Noonday (U. of Virginia Press, 2003), was a Top 20Book Sense selection and a nominee for the Old North State Award as well as a SIBA Book Award. She is associate editor of a collection of essays on international childhoods, Writing Out of Limbo, and the author of two scholarly books, Subject to Negotiation (U. of Virginia Press, 1997) and Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision (U. of Mississippi Press, 1987).

Orr has published extensively in literary magazines including The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Shenandoah, and Image Journal. Her short stories and short memoirs have won several Pushcart Prize nominations and competition prizes. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

She was born in Nigeria to medical missionary parents and spent her growing-up years in the savannahs and rain forests of that country. Her family remained in Nigeria during its civil war.

Orr left West Africa at age sixteen and attended college in Kentucky. She studied creative writing and literature at the University of Louisville before taking her Ph.D. in Literature and Theology at Emory University.

She is an award-winning Professor of English at North Carolina State University and serves on the faculty of the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University. She reads and lectures widely at universities and conferences from Atlanta to Austin to San Francisco to Vancouver to New York to Washington D.C., and in Nigeria.

Orr lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, Anderson Orr.

Tickets for the event are $30 for Friends members and Barton faculty/staff, students, and spouses; and $35 for all others.

For more information about invitations for the dinner, please contact Luann Clark at (252) 399-6329, or email the Friends at fohl@barton.edu. Space is limited, and after invitations have been issued, reservations for the dinner must be received by March 31, 2015.

This event is sponsored in part by BB&T.