Peter Orner is the author of three novels: THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST’S DAUGHTER (2025) THE SECOND COMING OF MAVALA SHIKONGO (2006), and LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE (2010), and three story collections: ESTHER STORIES (2001, 2013 with a foreword by Marilynne Robinson) LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE (2013), and MAGGIE BROWN & OTHERS (2019). His essay collection/ memoir, AM I ALONE HERE?: NOTES ON READING TO LIVE AND LIVING TO READ (Catapult, 2016) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He followed it up with another collection of essays, STILL NO WORD FROM YOU (2023), which was finalist for both the the Vermont Book Award and PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Peter is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Northeastern University School of Law, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Peter is also a former member of the Bolinas, California Volunteer Fire Department in Bolinas, California and current member of the Norwich Fire Department, Norwich, Vermont. He holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, and lives with his family in Norwich.

Peter also regularly teaches on the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. For many years, Peter was a professor in the MFA Program at San Francisco State University where he also served as acting chair of the department. He's also taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Visiting Professor), Northwestern, the University of Montana (William Kittredge Visiting Writer, 2009), Washington University (Visiting Hurst Professor, 2008), Bard College (Bard Fiction Prize Fellowship, 2007), Miami University, and on the law faculty of Charles University in Prague.

Peter's fiction and non-fiction 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. 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. He's also received a California Book Award (LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE), the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Writing (ESTHER STORIES) and has been a finalist for the Pen/ Hemingway Award ESTHER STORIES, the Los Angeles Times Book Award (THE SECOND COMING OF MAVALA SHIKONGO), and the Northern California Book Award (LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE) . In 2017-2018, Peter was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Namibia where he taught at the University of Namibia. 

His work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, and Japanese.